Does biology matter between a parent-child or is it the love for the child that counts? Is it the truth (love) that counts? If child abduction is a crime, is illegal
child retention also a crime? More importantly, what is the best interest of the child removed from biological family? With IVF children and its resident lack of laws creates unprecedented situations. Due to a cloud of secrecy and lies around infertility and IVF, there may be false documents created and passed of as “legal” but that does not make the documents valid. Further, it becomes very hard to say the truth because one may have lied several times and broken the laws in the past and by coming clean in the best interest of the child, there may be persecution once the truth is revealed about the fraud. We have to respect the prevailing laws and if we don’t like them, we petition for change in laws, but is breaking laws a crime? Why is so much importance given to biology between parent-child by laws? We need to protect innocent children even if a minority from IVFphiles – a new brand of criminal that places innocent IVF children in legal limbo.
1) Immigration laws in countries across the world are based on requiring a “biological link” between a parent and a child. Laws require biology and gender for immigration and splits families sometimes because the gender or biology may not match with a child. In a case of illegal retention of an Indian citizen IVF child in the US, have laws been followed? IVF procedures in the US give “preference to families that already have children by the same donor”, is that in the best interest of the child?
2) Recently, a worldwide hunt was launched to find a “biological link” with parents of a child. It seems that the only reason for suspicion was the “blonde girl” did not fit in with the parents raising her. Eventually the biological parents were found in Bulgaria based on scientific DNA tests. Is presenting fraud birth documents of an IVF child a crime, especially an IVF child who is illegally retained away from his only known biological family?
3) In another story, an IVF child’s US passport was revoked when it was revealed that there was suppression of facts about the child being born through IVF and there was “no biological link” with the parent. Why are the laws not followed consistently for all IVF children especially for children who are being illegally retained away from their only known biological family?
4) In another story, a US citizen mother was denied US passports for her IVF children because she did not have a “biological link” as she only carried them to term using donor eggs while a mother in the US was determined to be a mother who also had IVF children through donor eggs. Why the difference in the laws? Why is biology made so important?
5) In another story, A US couple was unable to take their IVF child to the US because there was an accident in the IVF clinic of sperm sample resulting in a DNA mismatch between the IVF child and the US Citizen father. The US government followed the laws of requiring “biological link” for an IVF child to immigrate ignoring that “accidents in technology” continue to occur due to no fault of the parents. Is the policy encouraging IVF parents to get fraud birth documents or false DNA tests? US is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, they can take a lesson from Madam Curie where accidents in science and technology should be appreciated and move forward, not be used as a tool for punishment due to lack of laws.
6) In another story in the US, a grandmother was arrested and charged because she presented fraud birth documents of her grandchild. She had a biological connection but not as a mother. But there is no legal action against a person illegally retaining an IVF child away from his biological family using false birth documents?
7) In another story in the US, a woman who abducted a child at 19 days old, Ms. Carlina White, discovered on her own of the fraud of her birth documents and led her to find her own biological parents. The woman who abducted the child, Ms. Petite, was charged and convicted admitted she wanted a child at any cost which she did, but what is the best interest of the child? Judge Kevin Castel presiding over the case said,
8) In another story, a US citizen father was united with his biological son from Brazil to live happily ever after as said by then US Secretary of State Clinton, “A child belongs with his [biological] family”. Where is the justice for an IVF child illegally being retained away from his only known biological family without telling him the truth. Where is the best interest of the child?
9) During the baby scoop era, lots of western countries, engaged in forced adoptions of innocent children because their only fault was being born to “single mothers” and its inherent “social inacceptability” at the time. Since then, there have been apologies from the governments and a valid voice from the children and the biological mothers who were coerced and forced to become an accomplice to the abduction of their own child. Is the discrimination being repeated against a different group of IVF fathers because we are in the “transition” of “social acceptance” of some fathers sharing equal parenting activities? Should “gay fathers” be banned parent rights simply because we as a society do think that “fathers” are less as a parent?
10) As a society, we should have every compassion for intersex people and infertile people. What about compassion for IVF children and families including donors and surrogates? The right answer is have equal laws and not break the laws. The right answer is to educate and spread awareness to get equal laws. We cannot go around breaking the laws and placing innocent IVF children in legal limbo. We cannot go around creating IVF children and then abandoning them for personal benefit without any responsibility or accountability for the welfare of the innocent IVF child. The IVF child is an equal human being and deserves and demands basic respect and dignity as a human if not equal.
You may also like
-
Intersection between Gender Equity and Solving Infertility Issues
-
It’s 2020 – Is it Time For #SurrogacyChildMeToo?
-
Texas Board Certified Houston Family Law Attorney Becky Reitz – A Texan Girl Child Deleter
-
SurrogacyGate : Maybe the innocent children and siblings have their “own best interest”?
-
Machiavellian Fertility Wars – What is the Best Interest of the Child?
11 thoughts on “Why is so much importance given to biology between parent-child by laws?”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
People with parents who were gamete donors do suffer from reduced legal rights and the inability to do anything about it because their identifying documents are falsified
They are not really any different than any other people; they have two biological parents – they are not IVF children….if they are under 18 they should just be referred to as children and then maybe the laws that protect all other children could be applied to them. Their rights should not be dependent upon the contractual agreements their parents set up with laboratories or doctors or the individuals who paid to give birth to them and raise them.
Agreed on the concept of “children” being treated as “children”, however, its the laws and the language of the laws which are anti-IVF which forces IVF parents to speak up for themselves and their innocent, voiceless IVF children. There is not a “significant” population affected by these anti-IVF laws and it may not be an “issue” but for the IVF parents, their IVF children are their entire world. People exploit or break laws but what happens when it hurts innocent children? Do they deserve protection and safeguards of their rights? “Compassion” is at the core of any IVF/surrogacy be it from a donor or surrogate or a fellow spouse who is trying to help their infertile spouse – something we should celebrate together as a humanity – yet miraculously the discriminatory laws and its exploitation have turned compassion into evil and a crime and something totally opposite – inhumane. An IVF child is a result of compassion of many and is to be celebrated and not to be vilified due to lack of laws. Speak up and raise your voice for the voiceless and lets live in a world where a child is just a child like every other child.
I’m really interested in what you have to say here.
“An IVF child is a result of compassion of many and is to be celebrated and not to be vilified due to lack of laws. Speak up and raise your voice for the voiceless and lets live in a world where a child is just a child like every other child.”
I’m trying to figure out if we agree or disagree. OK so what exactly do you mean by “IVF child”? What difference does it make how the father’s sperm connected to the mother’s egg? Should it really make a difference to the rights of the child or to the obligations of his biological mother and father whether their motives in conception were noble or not? Then a person’s rights are dependent upon the actions of their parents and that’s not fair at all. So a child should have the same rights and protections as any other child which include having identifiable bio parents who have an obligation to care for them and certainly to not abandon them at birth just because of some prior to birth contract they may have entered into with individuals who really wanted to raise their kids for them. There are legal avenues for that after birth in court that are intended to protect minors from being abandoned by bio parents as some sort of act of commerce or trade or gift. It’s very important that minors get citizinship in the country of their bio parents of course and that they not be trafficked to other countries by people claiming to be their parents who obtained them in black market adoption schemes. That’s a big reason why a lot of women in surrogate pregnancies try to bring those kids and get them citizenship but what it is, is trafficking being concealed by having given birth to another woman’s child. Those laws have to be there to protect the kids from having to pretend to be related to the woman that gave birth.
The point is that a child is a child and we should not be forced to define a child as an “IVF child” or “natural born child”. However, the laws are discriminatory whch forces us to discriminate. The call to action is for this to stop. Just because “thats the way it has been” is not a good enough excuse. Doing the right thing for the child is the right answer. Picture this, a person gives consent and pays to have an IVF child abroad using donor egg, sperm and surrogate meaning they have no connection with the child. Later, they decide they no longer want the child and just do not show up in the foreign country and implicitly abandoning the innocent, voiceless IVF child and also the surrogate who is either left with raising the child or giving them up for adoption and also not getting paid for her services as per the contract. The issue is because this is new, there are no laws and how does one enforce the rights of the IVF child and surrogate, if any? And the abandoning parent has no consequences to face. They changed their mind but in the process we have an innocent IVF child who is born, who do they go to? Who takes care of their welfare? Do they deserve the basic human decency and respect or are they an “oops mistake” by an affluent, careless person? Had the laws treated the “IVF child” like a regular child then all protections afforded by the laws would have been available to the innocent, voiceless child. It is obvious laws have not caught up with technology but does that mean adults who manipulate the system for personal benefit go unpunished while innocent, voiceless IVF children are victimized?
In your last comment you lay out a hypothetical situation which I totally agree is f’d up
“Picture this, a person gives consent and pays to have an IVF child abroad using donor egg, sperm and surrogate meaning they have no connection with the child. Later, they decide they no longer want the child and just do not show up in the foreign country and implicitly abandoning the innocent, voiceless IVF child and also the surrogate who is either left with raising the child or giving them up for adoption and also not getting paid for her services as per the contract. The issue is because this is new, there are no laws and how does one enforce the rights of the IVF child and surrogate, if any? And the abandoning parent has no consequences to face. They changed their mind but in the process we have an innocent IVF child who is born, who do they go to?”
What a messed up situation this is. But you are not using the right words to describe the players so your putting the blame for the situation on the wrong people. See you are referring to this General Contractor person as the child’s parent just because they paid the mother and father not to raise their child and because they paid yet another woman to gestate and deliver the child they agreed not to raise. The fact that this Dr. Frankenstein character abandoned his or her efforts towards the black market adoption of a child is actually a fantastic thing and the kid is much better off for it. That kid was not abandoned by that person because that person should not ever ever ever have been considered their parent in the first place. If that person backed out they’d be backing out of a scheme that denies the kid his/her right to care and support from both bio parents and a right not to be trafficked out of the country by that psycho who thought they could just buy a child give the kid their surname and smuggle them back into the United States and whine about how ‘their’ child is not given US citizenship because they are a US citizen and they bought their baby fair and square from a couple of gamete donating bio parents who agreed to allow some other woman to gestate and deliver their baby to further distance themselves from the reality that they are selling off their child to a person who wants to short cut the background checks and home study requirements and ethics investigations of court approved adoptions
The people who ‘commission’ others to relinquish their children should be punished for participating in black market adoption schemes and trafficking, but that should happen whether they take the kid home and raise them or if they have a change of heart and don’t. We should not be thinking of these commissioners as parents at all cause they are not. The children are not abandoned by those people for the child never had an implicit right to the care of anyone but their bio parents who in these cases sold them in the terms of their gamete donation contracts (sort of)
Gestational carriers are facilitating the parent’s crime of abandonment for sure, but they are not the mothers of the children they deliver they are merely helping in the trafficking efforts.
But the kids are for sure being abandoned by their bio parents and we need tighter laws to prevent them from going through with the back end of their contract after their kids are born Their private contract relinquishment of parental obligations should be held void against public policy and held unenforceable. Who should be responsible for taking care of these kids? The men and women who are their bio parents even if they are donors – they made them they are their responsibility
It is clear you feel very strongly about this issue. And one should because innocent children are involved. The fundamental issue is about fertility issues. And when laws do not exist, people may either use a technology like IVF for good or bad. The question is should we as a society and through our democratically elected governments have laws which FIRST protect the best interest of the child? Whether the child is born naturally or through IVF/Surrogacy – are they all equal? And are their rights equally protected? Why is abandoning an international IVF/Surrogacy child NOT a crime? The other question is if the laws where “non-genetic link” friendly (meaning infertile people without a genetic link to an IVF/surrogacy child born internationally), would an infertile person feel less threatened by the laws? If they were held equally responsible and accountable in the best interest of the child (with or without a genetic link), would that serve as a “check and balance”, a deterrent to NOT abandon an IVF/Surrogacy child internationally?
Yeah they should be culpable of trafficking but abandonment no way because how can they abandon if they are not actually the kid’s parents except for having bought that roll.
fair enough…the concern here is that same thinking should be applied consistently for children in their best interest meaning a person who has no genetic link with an IVF child cannot keep them away from their sibling. Or they should be held accountable for both IVF siblings for whom they consented to (meaning they cannot abandon an IVF child with no consequences). This inconsistency is why innocent IVF siblings are split. The call to action is the authorities need to recognize these loopholes in the laws and how certain individuals may take advantage of it to split innocent siblings for their own personal benefit. How is that right for the children? Who protects their rights or do innocent children have NO rights like stealing candy from a baby?
Do you mean government? Preventing a child from leaving the country with a person who bought them? Are you suggesting that a bio parent can’t bring their child back to the united states? Who is preventing that, explain. Cause if the child’s MOTHER changed her mind about a traditional surrogacy arrangement or gamete donation agreement and she wants to raise her child the two parents adults that they are will simply have to make arrangements for their child to live in both countries or one of them will have to move to the other parent’s country. They chose to make a baby with someone who lives in another country.
I mean laws and if its the government’s job to make laws, then yes the government. My job as a parent is to get equal rights for my innocent children. Perhaps, you can read the blog at https://unitesiblings.org/how-to-steal-an-ivf-child/ to get some background for the case. And yes to your point, a US Citizen bio parent is living in exile in India because his IVF/Surrogacy daughter cannot get to the US and her IVF/Surrogacy brother, born exactly the same way could NOT have entered the US legally also due to the same reasons. The discrimination is the double standards. And someone who knew the inconsistencies in the laws for international IVF/Surrogacy has exploited them for personal benefit while splitting and denying rights of innocent IVF siblings. There must be a better way to have a child than splitting siblings? As a bio parent, one has a choice to ALSO abandon their child OR move to the country where the surrogacy occurred and raise the child as you suggested. Does that mean the first IVF child should be alienated from his bio parent and siblings? Do the bio IVF parent and his IVF children have their own rights to grow up together lovingly and peacefully or should all submit to the infertile person because the laws are not in favor of people with “no genetic link”? Are infertile people more threatened by the unequal laws? Had equal laws existed, perhaps an infertile person would feel less threatened and innocent IVF siblings would not have been split up.