Posted on 08/23/2005 4:33:44 AM PDT by grundle
http://www.canadiancrc.com/articles/Patriot_News_Sperm_donor_loses_appeal_child_support_23JUL04.htm
Sperm donor loses appeal on child support
The Patriot News, Friday, July 23, 2004, BY REGGIE SHEFFIELD of The Patriot-News, Harrisburg, PA, U.S.A.
The state Superior Court yesterday ruled that a man must pay child support to a woman who conceived twin boys with his sperm through in vitro fertilization.
The opinion upholds a Dauphin County Court order filed in 2002.
Joel L. McKiernan now must pay up to $1,500 each month, but he argued that an oral agreement he had with Ivonne V. Ferguson protected him from any payments, according to court papers.
When McKiernan agreed to be a sperm donor for Ferguson -- a co-worker with whom he had had an affair between 1991 and 1993 -- she promised she would never seek support payments from him, court documents said. But in 1999, she began seeking support.
Superior Court Judge Patrick R. Tamilia wrote that the oral contract between McKiernan and Ferguson is essentially worthless, because the rights for child support belong to the twins, not to either parent.
"The oral agreement between the parties that [McKiernan] would donate his sperm in exchange for being released from any obligation for any child conceived, on its face, constitutes a valid contract," Tamilia wrote in a six-page decision.
"Based on legal, equitable and moral principles, however, it is not enforceable," Tamilia wrote.
Efforts to reach Ferguson and McKiernan were unsuccessful.
According to the court papers, Ferguson persuaded McKiernan to donate his sperm for in vitro fertilization in 1993, when their relationship waned. Ferguson was married, but her husband filed for divorce on the day she underwent the IVF procedure, court papers said.
On Aug. 25, 1994, Ferguson gave birth to the twins. She listed her ex-husband, not McKiernan, as the biological father on the birth certificate, according to court papers.
McKiernan had little contact with Ferguson during this time, other than visiting her in the hospital when she was in labor and spending an afternoon with her and the boys two years later, court documents said.
Elizabeth Stone, a family law attorney, said that Pennsylvania law very clearly holds that the right to child support belongs to the children and not the parents.
"Even though the child is a minor, he cannot in any way extend that right to the parent," Stone said. "So even a contract can be immediately invalidated by running to the court and filing for support."
With in vitro fertilization, a sperm cell and egg cell are combined outside the woman's body, and the resulting embryo is placed in her uterus. About 1 million children have been conceived through in vitro fertilization, which was first done in 1978.
The issue of child support and in vitro fertilization has found its way into court in other jurisdictions.
REGGIE SHEFFIELD
Copyright 2004 The Patriot-News
Frankly, I don’t respect that. I see your concern for the innocent, but also a kind of bitterness and contempt toward other innocents that you believe are wrong. I could just change a few specific words in your last post and place it as is on the Democrat Underground promoting the undermining of “smoke and mirror” laws that protect doctors, corporations, soldiers or anything else they personally judge needs to to be torn down for some greater good and their opinion of an overriding “natural law”.
Next time you question how the left can be so unprincipled as to undermine representative democracy and Congress to press judges to rewrite long standing precedent in order to support the social agenda of a minority that probably couldn’t get their agenda passed in legislature otherwise, please remember this post.
In that regard, this is my favorite Dr. Laura quote: “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something.” I’ve got to go now. Regards.
I think it does make legal sense.
It really comes down to He said, she said.
You're a family judge. Before you are a man and woman who had a long-running sexual relationship, then it ended. Then the man allegedly (for nothing is in writing) agrees to impregnate the woman, and she promises (allegedly) not to seek support. Or so he says.
Long-running consensual sexual relationship.
Pregnancy resulting in children outside of marriage.
Father claiming mother said he wasn't responsible.
Mother claiming that's not what she meant.
Court seeing two kids needing support.
I've got a blind poodle who could figure this one out.
As for the anonymous donors in sperm banks being vulnerable, maybe, but that won't be derived from this case.
I'm with you.
Your blind poodle would be excused for not recognizing that none of that’s in contention. The judge simply voided a legal contract without precedent and said that no contract abdicating a sperm donor of responsibility can be made by the mother on behalf of a child.
"you father the child you pay for the child" that has predated the US legal system.
Even the presumption of a "child born during wedlock is the husband's" is based on that assumption. (from preDNA days).
The rules for NOT paying just because some fiction of a sperm donor is the new "thing". The sperm donation contract is contrary to the establish legislative and common law (and even civil code) of support belongs to the child.
This is not a left concept, it is about supporting the next generation. It is the left that seeks to break any links other than those that involve all pay government for redistribution to each according to their needs.
No, you don’t “pay for the child” after anonymous sperm donation, for better or for worse, at least not until this activist judge said so. I don’t consider tens of thousands of standing contracts after almost 50 years to be “a new thing”.
you are confusing apples and oranges. This was NOT anonymous donation.
It has NEVER been legal for a mother to waive child support.
This judge did NOT create anything new.
Wow. Several years ago I was approached by a couple (friends of a friend of a friend situation) who wanted me to donate sperm so the wife could be artificially inseminated. Since the husband was sterile and he & I looked a lot alike, they felt that I'd make a good donor and offered me $1000 to make the deal sweeter. They had all of the paperwork ready to free me from legal claims, and all I had to do was say yes and go into a little room with a little cup. My wife thought it was a good idea (she felt sorry for the woman), my friends thought it was a good idea (easy grand), and even my dad thought it was a good idea (it looked like the kid would have grown up in a home with two great parents).
I said no. In the end, no matter how many great arguments there were for it, I knew that I simply couldn't deal with the fact that I had another child out there that I wasn't allowed to see, hold, or raise. That trumped everything else.
Looking at this ruling, it looks like I made the right choice. The woman and her husband divorced last year, so if I'd agreed I'd probably be getting hit with a child support suit right about now.
It has NEVER been legal for a mother to waive child support.
This judge did NOT create anything new.
You are not reading. The controversy here is NOT about the non-anonymous nature of this donor. It’s about the basis for the judges ruling, that NO contract can be made between a mother and a sperm donor, with no exclusion for anonymity.
It has ALWAYS been legal for a mother to waive child support for anonymous donors.
The judge DID create something absolutely new (or at least inadvertently could have).
This is going nowhere. Nothing new is being added. Now confused people are shouting. I’ve said all I need. Life’s short. I’m done.
I think you can't see the forest for the trees. You're so caught up in technical legalities, you're overlooking reality.
I'm with Robert and his poodle on this one.
Technically, an oral contract is a legal contract, but it's a little hard to enforce such a contract in a court of law because there is no evidence that such a contract ever existed. So HE claims it did, and SHE claims otherwise.
Meanwhile, children's lives are at stake. Now what?
Furthermore, a decision like this should make future parties involved in I-V fertilization think twice about the consequences.
No bitterness, but you have to admit there's a hierarchy of "innocents" involved here. The donors may be innocent, but at least they had some volition in their acts, including a duty to think through the possible results of plugging themselves blindly into a baby-making factory. The babies, however, are MORE innocent in that didn't have a choice but ARE dependent upon the good decisions of others.
DU'ers can use the phrase "smoke and mirrors" if they like. In my mind, civil liberties trump most others, and those spring from the basic nature of human existence as designed by God (all men created equal with the rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness spring from God and being inherent in the individual). Human existence, in turn, springs from men and women who need to accept the consequences of their reproductive behavior.
If the sperm donor is not the father, who is? I can just find no way of avoiding the conclusion that the donor is the father. So the question becomes, should society waive his paternal obligations? On what basis? Should society actively encourage fatherless homes and procreation outside of marriage? I don't think so, and that genie is already almost slipped from the bottle, to the detriment of fathers' rights.
If men don't act responsibly, the government, companies and courts will gladly shoulder them out of the family unit all together.
"The best way to look at this case is that the use of the IVF procedure was irrelevent."
The court said nothing about how it happened. What they said is that the rights to support belong to the children, not to the parents. This is the idiocy of the ruling.
You are right about the fact that the IVF procedure is essentially irrelevant here. It also means that any other method is also irrelvant too. All that matters is that chidren happened, and in so doing they have the right to support from the biological parents. That means if a man uses a condom, throws it away, but the woman recovers it and uses it to impregnate herself, the child holds the right to support regardless of the intent of the father.
I love the way women work. Now it will be impossible for lesbians to become pregnant, because, as the courts have ruled, there is no way to indemnify the donor from responsibility - even if the donation is essentially anonymous. The intent of the father, as usual, is irrelevant.
As for there being essentially no difference between IVF and a natural conception, well, there is nothing romantic about it. It is a completely different matter than a natural conception.
First of all, its an elective medical procedure. You can hardly construe that as part of someone being in a romantic relationship. Fact is, it doesn't matter if the two had an affair, if she wasn't pregnant prior to the IVF process, then all bets are off.
IVF isn't the simple turkey baster exercise you may be imagining. First, the female goes on a regimen that allows for the overstimulation of the ovaries to produce as many eggs as possible. That one sentence sums up a month long series of daily injections of hormones plus a vitamin regimen prior to the day the eggs are harvested.
That special day the female is given a local anesthetic or sometimes something stronger. A needle about two feet long is inserted into the wall of the vagina into the area around the stimulated ovary. The eggs (actually, the individual sacks of fluid that have the eggs floating in them) are then harvested and put into individual tubes. The rack is then sent through a window in the procedure room for preparation. While that happens, the man then donates his part of it. This is done with no lubrication of any kind except water. Saliva or any lubricant can break down the protective outside of the sperm cells.
The sperm is washed, and then combined with each of the eggs. A period of 48 to 72 hours follows in which the eggs either developed into multicell embroys (6,8, and 10 cell embryos are ideal - blastocyst stage embryos are not). At that time the female comes in to have the embryos (ethical clinics will do no more than three in order to avoid what is euphemistically and ironically called 'selective reduction') implanted in the prepared uteris. The female's body has been fooled into believing that her normal reproductive cycle has occured, and after the implanting of the embryos into the uteris the female undergoes serveral doses of HCG to prompt the body into recognizing that she is indeed pregnant. After the initial doses, the amount should double in the bloodstream every 24 hours. HCG is the chemical switch that tells the female body not to have a mensus, essentially.
Now, I'm telling you all of this out of memory as a daddy, not as a doctor (I'm an engineer). There is absolutely nothing romantic about it. It is as cold and painful an elective medical procedure as you can get. The guy in question is a moron for not having some sort of binding legal agreement on paper for this, but your claim that the IVF could be construed as something really no different than if they had had a natural childbirth is, well, wrong in every sense. The man didn't just donate sperm and had it frozen for use later. He likely went in with her that day and had more than a tough time getting his part of it done - though definitely easier than she had it.
If she had a verbal agreement with him about the use of the sperm, there is little doubt she could have either misheard, misconstrued, or misinterpreted that intent. She simply went back on her word in as calculated a way as anyone could have under the circumstances.
I'm sorry, but how do we know this? How do we know that SHE went back on her word, and that it wasn't HE who went back on his word? For that matter, how do we know that the agreement wasn't something like - "as long as you're married, I won't be financially responsible, but if you ever find yourself single and in need, I'll be there??"
A lot of people here are making assumptions that the woman is evil, the guy is just some poor innocent victim, and the children... well, screw the children, they have no rights.
Like I said before, the only victims here are the children. Everyone else is responsible for the DECISIONS THEY MADE.
bump
" but he argued that an oral agreement he had with Ivonne V. Ferguson..."
So what if an egg donor..
Birth mother keep the child and all rights; egg donor woman payes child support?
Egg donor mother keep the child and all rights; birth woman payes child support?
The petrie dish cut both way
There was a case earlier this year where a woman, um, "smuggled" the man's semen in her mouth, then had herself impregnated with it, without the man's knowledge. He was ordered to pay child support.
Oh, I was not suggesting anything contrary. I was merely pointing out that the parents in this case did have a long-term relationship, so there is some connection between the father and the baby, even if it is only through the mother. My purpose was to differentiate this case from anonymous sperm donation, because there seemed to be some confusion.
Did you read what is involved in IVF? It takes months, plus two separate surgical procedures.
I grant you the guy was stupid. If he didn't want to be involved he should have donated the sperm under some sort of legal binding written contract.
Let's say he 'gave his word' on this. Why didn't she get THAT in writing before engaging in the process (not an inexpensive process either - $6K to $10K is typical).
As for the husband, this woman required shots to the back of her hip daily, and then the HCG shots after that. Then there is progesterone with the HCG after that. Where was he during all of this?
As for the kids being losers - there is still adoption. If she can't make a life for them, then she should put them up for adoption. Not the easiest decision, but probably the best for the kids. Good families in long lines for domestic adoptions.
I wasn't implying that the Husband is a poor innocent victim. He's an idiot for not having the agreement on paper. Bottom line on all of this is that only married people should be allowed to have IVF done.
Based on this ruling, no lesbian or homosexual will be able to do any sort of IVF or surrogacy because support rights fall to the children, and so no matter what kind of agreement the adults come to the donor (male or female) is still liable for support and open to litigation.
The courts here have probably done conservatism a favor here. This cuts any single parent or gay family from ever pursuing children other than through adoption.
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