The couple petitioned Porter County Circuit Court to have the genetic mother's name on the child's birth certificate. The surrogate, V.G.'s sister, filed an affidavit supporting their petition. The judge refused, ruling that "Indiana law does not permit a non-birth mother to establish maternity. Indiana law holds the birth mother is the legal maternal mother."
On Thursday, attorney Steven Litz asked the Court of Appeals to intervene. The problem, said Litz, is that the law hasn't kept up with reproductive technology. Indiana's paternity law was passed more than 50 years ago, when surrogate parenting didn't exist.
There are no federal guidelines for surrogacy, and state laws are "really all over the place," Litz said. In Indiana, surrogacy isn't illegal but contracts are not enforceable and surrogates cannot be required to give up a child. The state's surrogacy law doesn't address cases in which the surrogate is not the genetic mother.
The judges gave no indication when they might issue a ruling in this case. Litz said it might eventually be up to the Indiana General Assembly to untangle the legal issues.
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6 comments:
That is awful. When you CHOOSE to be a surrogate, you are CHOOSING to give up all legal rights to that child. It is hard enough on the parents who cannot conceive their own child. So you help them, and then you hurt them...
I think women who agree to be surrogates must be very caring people to have agreed to this in the first place.
If they develop feeling for the baby during the nine months they are carrying it, it is not something they should be FORCED to give up.
Why does a child have to have only one "mother"? There are many step mothers due to divorce, and many step fathers, so many children end up with more than one "mother" as it is!! Why shouldn't they treat it like a divorce case, where both parties have some rights, and the judges decide on a case-by-case basis who gets custody based on who seems to be the better parent for the baby, and the other usually gets visitation rights. So why is it one way when it is a man versus a woman than it is when it is a woman versus another woman? What difference does it really make, when everyone agrees children can have competing parent claims. Visitation might solve a lot of problems, and I don't think it is fair to pretend being a surrogate mother is the same as any other contract over something like who owns a refrigerator!! It just isn't.
If you rrad the article again, it is the courts not the surrogate that is agaginst it.
correction "read"
I DID read the article and I understood that, as did the person who left the previous post. The surrogate herself is not "hurting" the parents in this case, either. However I feel there needs to be a new perspective on parental rights. It is okay for a child to have two "fathers" a father AND step father who have to get along for the good of the child, but that is only if it is due to divorce, not adoption or any other case. There was a prominent "who is the mother" surrogacy case, with both sets of parents fighting over the same child, and for some reason "joint custody" and "visitation rights" were not considered appropriate even by the press, etc. With all the forms of parenthood biology has created, only the old fashioned divorce seems to justify "you're going to have to put up with each other" no matter what, and otherwise it is too "weird" for a child to have more than one set of parents!!!
I also feel this way because of a highly publicized case of an evil birth father won his son away from his adoptive "only parents he had ever known". The child was about 4 yrs old and had never MET the "birth father". Eventually an article admitted that the "birth father" had filed his objections within days of the child's birth, but it had been tied up for so long partly because of arguments on whose state had jurisdiction, and for some reason, it had seemed appropriate not to allow any visits the entire time, despite the possibility the other state would "win" and why wasn't he good enough to meet the child if he was good enough to raise him! When his state won, the child was publicly dragged hysterically from his "real parents" i think keeping him from meeting the child before then had everything to do with the ultimate problem.
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