The folks at various places have made a big deal about the fact that babies born of donor eggs are pretty much the same in the eyes of society as babies born of my own eggs. Clearly that is not true, based on the story (and based on comments in this thread).

Don't get me wrong; we're not seriously considering it at this time. I ain't frazzled by honest responses. It's just not what I expected based on the brochures Propaganda, it's everywhere!

Here's the 1992 CDC guidelines. There are new guidelines that were completed last year, but I don't see them published yet.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/mvsact92b.pdf

It says that whoever gives birth to the child is assumed to be the mother unless state laws provide otherwise.

The paternity is much more complicated.

And then, there is this. NJ decision says the mother that's on the BC is not the legal mother because she has neither biological or natal connection. She has to adopt him to make him legal.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/0 ... ws_in.html

I'm not buying argument. As an adult, choose your country of citizenship. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too.

Unless the mother is married. Most court rulings I've seen hold that the husband is the father of that child, regardless of her extra-marital affairs and such.

I'm starting to get pizzed at this brave new world.

It's an unknown mother (and father) because the donors gave anonymously. Ellie can't find out who the donors are and so she can't prove they were citizens.

And the US says she has to.

I reckon the bottom line was, it wasn't her egg OR a U.S. citizen's sperm. But you're right, Clan, that makes no sense.

Adoption you go before a court and say "hey this kid isn't related to me but I want and will accept the role of being its parent." You have basically the same case with invitro with donor sperm and egg but you side step all the legal adoption requirements because it came out of your/your wife's womb.

What bothers me is that I see different couples demanding different outcomes/acceptance based on the same facts. We have cases of surrogate mothers giving birth to children who are not biologically related to them for another couple/mother and people want these incubators just seen as loving incubators for the couple who sperm & egg it is. The egg/sperm folks what to be seen as the hild's parents from the get go -- after all it was their sperm and egg. Now the "incubator" now wants to be the default mother and all of a sudden though not the egg donor we are supposed to see her as the mother.

Personally, I would like to see the laws regarding children uniform and reflective of the fact that a woman giving birth does not imply she is the biological mother anymore. I would advocate for if the kid isn't biologically yours you have to adopt it, no matter how you got it, who carried it or who planned it.

Maybe I see this as way too simplistic and yes if she had lied everything would have been hunky dory, but jus soli means if you born on the soil (with certain exceptions) your parentage/blood is irrelevant and jus sanguis means it's not, that you have to born (biologically related) to a mother or father to get automatic citizenship (in certain circumstances).

This much I knew. Wifehorn and I adopted both our sons.

We adopted in the U.S. Both boys born in Fresno, CA. But many, many adoptions are done overseas, particularly with China, South Korea, Russia ...

I ::think:: that if we'd adopted a Chinese girl born in China, she'd be a U.S. citizen today. Natural born citizen, not so much maybe. Is adoption de facto naturalization?

There are more than 300 million Americans today. Over the course of time, there have probably been almost a billion Americans, most of whom are long gone today.

Of those billion Americans, only 43 have ever been President. For most folks, we don't have to parse all this out like we do.

What is the status of the twins at the instant of birth? Is their LEGAL status: the children of the American citizen at the instant of birth? I'm not talking about the genetics. I'm talking about the legal status.

Here, based on my understanding, a child I bore would be considered at birth my legal child.

Should I switch from knitting socks to baby booties?

Hahaha. No. We just research stuff. Our motto: be prepared!

Are surrogates legal mothers? After the birth, do they have to sign papers relinquishing her parental rights and give the child up for adoption. I don't know the answer and it may be different from state to state.

I have neighbors who are a married gay couple. They have have donated sperm and fathered one child each with two surrogate mothers. The children are the same age. It would be interesting to know if they have legal mothers or just two legal fathers.

There have been cases in which surrogate mothers refused to "turn over" the babies that they had brought to life. A British High Court ruled in favor of one such surrogate mother. These have all been women who were paid to bear the children, AFAIK.

By that reasoning, if al-Qaeda stole some American sperm and an egg, as long as they came with the proper papers, the child would be a U.S. citizen if conceived in vitro and given birth by a terrorist surrogate. That result is absurd.

I'd like to see some actual legal paper saying this, because it seems more likely to me that someone screwed up somewhere. So far as I know, a child presumptively belongs to its birth mother. By the reasoning in this hypothetical (since I'm not convinced this story is even true or complete), the child could not even inherit if the mother died intestate.

According to the US State Dept/Bureau of Consular Affairs - US citizenship for children born abroad is determined by biological relationship to the parent(s).




They state that a case of using sperm for artificial insemination from a US citizen would be the same as an "out of wedlock" birth to a citizen father and the resulting children could be US citizens if the meet a number of conditions, some of which are:



They also spell out the rules for using in vitro and having non-biological children and even give an example:



http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship ... p_782.html

When you dig through all of that published info, it starts to make sense - the result is odd, but you can see where they were starting from. All of the written stuff related to ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) setting seems to assume the use of a surrogate to bear the biological child of the US parent -- not the US parent using ART with both donor eggs & sperm to bear biologically unrelated children.

When you think about it, that's a rather unusual circumstance -- usually women who have fertility issues are trying to find a way to bear biologically related children - they may rely on IVF to fertilize their own ova, or if married they may be using donated ova fertilized with the husband's sperm .... but the setting described in the article is rather unusual. (and kind of risky, given that older women are at higher risk for complications during pregnancy as well as premature delivery-- the woman referenced in the article was in her 40's).

I don't know how common the situation described in the article is now becoming -- I guess in a world with Octomom, anything is possible.

But from a pragmatic standpoint, I can see how the State Dept. would have developed a set of regulation geared to the surrogate situation, which would have a rather large potential for fraud, so DNA testing makes sense.

If they turn it around and say that the citizenship of the woman who bore the child determines the child's status -- that would create a rather large international market for US-born surrogates.

Adoption is different, because the foreign-born children of US citizens only become US citizens as of the time the children immigrate to the US -- see http://www.hooyou.com/adoption/citizenship.html - and the twins in this case are living in Israel - with the mom also maintaining her residence in Israel. Otherwise, there wold be an obvious solution: the mom would simply adopt the surrogate children she gave birth to. (I'm using the term "surrogate" here to refer to the babies as I don't know of a better term).

So here the circumstances are somewhat unique: it applies because the mother wants US Citizenship for her children, but does not want to live in the US or raise her children there (at least for now). If she did want to return to the US, then it seems like the best legal solution would be for her to adopt the children she bore. (There is a name for this - embryo adoption -- you can Google that term, as well as the phrase "embryo donation" for more info. )

I'm thinking they probably need a whole new set of laws & regulations geared to sorting this all out.

I was born in Canada to Canadian parents, adopted by US citizens and 3 years later was naturalised. If things are still the same, foreign born, adopted children are not natural born, unless born to Americans overseas.

Jeez, there's the bottom line. I'm living in a world far beyond the scope of my imagination.

Thanks, Adrian. I kinda suspected as much.

This is a little off the track of the current discussion -- or perhaps just a more fundamental question -- but I find myself a bit startled at some of the uses of the term "biological mother."

Before IVF and IVF-surrogacy really existed, this had a simple meaning: the mother that bore you, as opposed to the adoptive mother that raised you. Being genetically related was identical to "came out of the womb of."

(But maybe I am being naive about this.)

Nevertheless, it's clear from CB and others that the regulations now take "biological mother" to mean "developed from her genetic material." But all three trimesters of pregnancy, and giving birth, is in reality much more than a 'sentimental' attachment (which is what's focused on when surrogates renege), isn't it? It's also "biological" -- there's a physical connection (the umbilical and placenta), sharing of fluids, etc. -- there are even circumstances where the carrier mother's and fetus's lives are interdependent, and diseases and accidents where one would not be savable without the other. So in "lay" (not legal) terms, that can't be anything but "biological."

So it just seems odd to me to have the term "biological" being used now explicitly to exclude the very circumstance that it used to define.

On reflection, "biological father" has always meant the same thing -- switching to adding sperm by pipette instead of by intercourse, or to a petri dish instead of 'naturally,' didn't change anything about the father's role, and no second man has any ancillary role at all.

I am tempted to wonder if the simplistic use and interpretation of "biological" as a descriptor has been the victim of male hegemony (as has so much else) and the lag in adapting statute to these more complicated cases is not so much a phenomenon of the advancing times and in-vitro science, but as much or more a phenomenon of sexist mores, and not recognizing that egg, womb, woman, and fetus are deeply connected in complex ways.

They did change things, with a law about foreign adoptions by US citizens that went into effect in 2001 -- but that law says that the adopted children become citizens as of the time they immigrate to the US & the adoption is final. See http://www.hooyou.com/adoption/citizenship.html

That doesn't make them "natural born" -- but they do not go through the naturalization process either. It is automatic when the conditions for citizenship are met. If the children are not living in the US, then they have to go through the naturalization process.

Actually, I would say that you are referring to a physiological rather than a biological connection. I would consider the biological connection to be a the cellular, chromosomal level. Of course there is a connection formed with the process of pregnancy and carrying a baby to term -- but there is also a strong bond formed when a woman nurses an infant, and I don't think that the founding fathers would have confused the natural mother with a wet nurse.

In any case, because the US is jus soli, the primary determination of citizenship is not biological at all -- it is the location of birth, and "birth" is clearly understood to be the moment the infant leaves the womb. It doesn't matter where the mother is from or whose genetic material she is carrying, if the birth takes place on US soil.

Children of citizens are recognized to be citizens by virtue of a statutory framework, and the details of the statutes have been modified many times over the years, so really the dual-citizen Israeli mom is just dealing with the fact that the statute either does not contemplate her situation, or at least has not not been interpreted to cover her situation. I mean -- while it unlikely -- Congress could easily pass a new law that could change the terms on which even natural children born abroad to US citizens acquire citizenship.

I don't think there is any great injustice in this particular case -- i think it's a case of a woman who failed to do her homework & fully research the implications for citizenship when she decided to use IVF but forego the use of her own ova. I say that because I think that the State Department site is pretty clear in stating that the IVF situation raises issues. I don't think the issue really is whether the sperm & egg donor are US citizens -- I think the issue is simply that the current statutes say that the natural, biological children of citizens born abroad can become citizens; and set forth a different procedure for adoption. To be implanted with an unrelated embryo is in essence an in-utero adoption (assuming the mother plans to keep the baby and is not a surrogate for someone else) -- and presumably there is some paperwork completed along the way to clarify the legal status. Obviously this leaves a gap in the law & some questions -- but my point is that Congress would certainly have the power to close that gap by simply specifying that such children are to be treated the same as adopted children. That would provided a path toward citizenship, but the children would not become citizens as long as they continued to reside abroad.

i disagree, i think they have defined the term to mean what it always meant -- the woman who provided the egg, the man who provided the sperm are the biological parents. It's just that in the past the woman who provided the egg was also the woman who carried/delivered the child.

I keep thinking about the expression "mother's baby, father's maybe."

I think the hard part here is the disconnect between carrying a child and being the woman who created the egg. We handled the disconnect with sperm donors for decades but that seemed natural to us since the man never carried the baby.

That seemed natural to men, since men were making policy.

That was part of my point.

I was trying to separate a lay view from a legal view. Now you separate a lay view from a scientist's view.

(If I sound argumentative I'm really not; I am struggling to lay down terms and understand the historical imperatives.)

Biology is the study of life. I don't think a matter is only or necessarily viewed from a 'chromosomal' perspective, to be considered 'biological.'

And I'm not talking about 'bonds.' I am just saying: how is it not biological to implant a bit of inviable matter not bigger than the head of a pin in the uterus of a woman, watch that gestate over 34 weeks, be subject to the woman's nutrition and chemical cycles, be nourished by her body, in fact BE nothing if not for that woman's physiological (yes) role (for many of those weeks), and then emerge a little person and have to be cut to separate them.... what you're calling the "biological" part -- the combining of sperm and ovum -- is pointless without the rest. How is it not biological?

I get that the regs have taken a different view. I just wonder if the simplistic male equations made it easier for policy-makers to gloss over the fact that it is profoundly different for women.