So, let me see if I understand.
If a woman goes to a fertility clinic and is fertilized by ostensibly anonymous sperm, if she finds out who the donor is she can go after him for child support?
This doesn't make any legal sense.
Would you expect it to? Remember, judges are allowed to make up law as they go along. It's very "Alice in Wonderland".
On another note, any man that donates sperm in any fashion is a fool.
Those are not the facts in this case. In this case, the mother and father were involved in a multi-year sexual affair, and he donated his sperm for IVF as part of that relationship. If this woman had become pregnant in the natural way, nobody would be questioning this ruling.
The best way to look at this case is that the use of the IVF procedure was irrelevent. This child was concieved as part of a long-term romantic relationship between two people. There are a lot of child custody cases out there where the relationship is much more casual than this.
The only smart guy in this whole story is the ex-husband. Getting the divorce on the same day as the IVF treatment was a smart move, otherwise there would be a presumption that the resulting child was his, and he would be on the hook!
I think there actually was a case like that. It's a weird world: In Sweden, apparently, a sperm donor was order to pay child support after a lesbian couple using the sperm, dissolved relationship after 10 yrs. Noteworthy since SCOTUS is looking to foreign courts rather than USA for guidance.
Back here in the States, a 14 yr old male, who was used by a 21 yr old married female, was required to pay child support even though he could not legally consent and claimed he did not. Paternity was discovered when she broke up with her husband years later.
Other cases like the PA case have happened as well.
Men's reproductive rights simply don't exist in a postmodern feminist's utopia.
I think this case is different, it wasn't anonymous sperm. The guy had a friggin' verbal contract, he was playing diu lawyer, he had to be a moron. The husband was right to run as far away as possible.
I don't understand why they used artifical insemination, unless the donor was smart enough to realize that if he did it the old fashioned way and was later hailed into court his verbal contract would be worse than worthless.
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.