For hundreds of years parentage laws in the United States have been grounded on the premise that a man and a woman must have “intimate relations” in order to conceive a child. Recent advances in medical technology have changed that paradigm and the child of the modern family is often conceived in a medical laboratory rather than in a bedroom. Conceiving a child the modern way may involve as many as six people in the process if the intended parents need donor eggs or sperm or a woman to gestate the child. Although well over a million children have been conceived through some kind of “third party reproduction” the parentage laws in some states, including New York, have completely ignored these changes. The result is that many children conceived through third party reproduction lack a secure legal relationship with their parents. This is simply unacceptable since - as New York State Justice George Bundy Smith wrote in his concurring opinion in H.M. v. E.T.: “there are few areas of the law where certainty is more important than in the rules governing who a child’s parents are”

This CLE presentation will address the way children are being conceived and gestated when the assistance of a third party is required and how parentage laws have evolved outside of New York to address these changes. The balance of the presentation will discuss the many ways New York law is inadequate to protect children conceived through third party reproduction. We’ll end with a discussion of Child Parent Security Act - a bill currently pending in the New York Legislature - which we believe would present a comprehensive solution to these problems.