By Patrick Lacroix, Esq.
Stories of people who have turned to Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) to build their families have captivated the media’s attention in recent years. There can be no question that ART is changing the way we see family as a society. Surrogacy, especially, presents exciting new issues of family, law and morality.
Perhaps the best example of the questions raised by ART, and surrogacy, can be found in the story of a couples’ decision to have “Twiblings”: two genetically identical siblings, who were born to two different gestational carriers (i.e., surrogates), and only five days apart.
In the New York Times article, Meet the Twiblings, the children’s mother chronicles her experiences as she and her husband desperately attempted to have twins the old fashioned way – through in vitro fertilization. Ultimately, when her doctors advised against further I.V.F. treatments, she and her husband turned to surrogacy to fulfill their dream of having children. With the raw materials coming from four people (the husband’s sperm, an anonymous egg donor and two separate gestational carriers) they succeed in having twins, or at least Twiblings. To learn more about this amazing family, click on the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/magazine/02babymaking-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=meet%20the%20twiblings&st=cse
As a nation, our laws on surrogacy vary dramatically from state to state. Some states have laws that are supportive of surrogacy. Other states go so far as to criminalize surrogacy agreements. Still others offer little guidance for the parties involved in these arrangements. Arizona falls into this latter category of states, with laws that can only be described as unclear. By statute, for instance, surrogacy contracts are prohibited in Arizona. Our courts, however, have upheld the parental rights of the intended parents in surrogacy cases and concluded that Arizona’s statute is unconstitutional on several grounds.
With no clarification in Arizona’s law in over a decade, and the public increasingly viewing surrogacy as an exciting new means of creating a family, surrogacy agreements have begun to flourish in Arizona.
Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about the laws concerning ART, surrogacy or adoption.
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