what makes a parent?
An Australian man claims
his ex-girlfriend "stole" his sperm, that he should be considered a
sperm donor, and that he shouldn't have to pay child support. I have little sympathy for his particular argument, though I do have a little bit of a reflexive
hyper-libertarian opposition to forced "child support."
Child support is an issue whose core principles are tough to ascertain. Cathy Young has
a nice Salon piece which points out the asymmetry of parental choice -- in a
legal sense, women have rights while men have responsibilities:
Did the woman ask him to impregnate her and sign an agreement relieving him of any financial obligations? He's still liable if she changes her mind. Was he underage and legally a victim of statutory rape? Makes no difference. (One such case, in Kansas in 1993, involved a 12-year-old boy molested by a baby sitter.) Did the woman have her way with him when he had passed out from drinking and brag to friends that she had saved herself a trip to the sperm bank? Tough luck, said Alabama courts. Did she retrieve his semen from the condom she had asked him to wear during oral sex and inseminate herself with a syringe? Yes, it's a true story, and in 1997 the Louisiana Court of Appeals told the man to pay up, saying that a male who has any sexual contact with a woman -- even oral sex with a condom -- should assume that a pregnancy may ensue.
In Young's examples, sperm-donation seems to be the root issue. But that's not the whole story -- the law isn't terribly amenable to
using DNA tests to disprove paternity claims:
Like most states, California makes it difficult for men such as Conners to disestablish paternity once they have formally acknowledged it. The practice stems in part from a 500-year-old doctrine of English common law that presumes a man is the legal father of any child born to his wife during their marriage.
No, there's a fundamental question, insofar as we're concerned with parental responsibilities: "
What makes a parent?" An
interesting (but old) article out of the
IIT Catalyst points out that we're heading for a clash between reproductive technology and parental responsibilities:
Conceived from donor sperm and a donor egg and born to a surrogate mother in 1995, she’s at the heart of one of the nation’s most complex surrogate-birth cases. An Orange Country Superior Court judge has ruled that she has no legal parent.
And as we make further advances in genetic engineering, cloning, and reproductive science, we're going to have to stop relying on half-millennium-old common law and start giving these issues some serious thought.