Posted on 09/22/2006 8:52:55 AM PDT by momfirst
He says the clinic gave a stranger his sperm and then lied about it.
She says the clinic coerced her into taking the morning-after pill and then offered her a free abortion.
Now he wants to know whether he's a father without his consent.
And she just wants to be left alone.
Oregon Health & Science University concedes it gave his sperm to her, but beyond that it's not saying much.
On Monday, a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge will be asked to sort out whether the man has the right to learn whether the woman has had a baby and if it is his.
The case involves a high-stakes clash of an anonymous woman's right to privacy and an unwitting sperm provider's desire to have a relationship with a biological child.
It also raises serious ethical questions about how OHSU handled the mistake.
"OHSU is deeply sorry for this situation," Barbara Glidewell, OHSU patient advocate and ethicist, said in a statement. "Health care providers are human, and error is inevitable. Our goal now is to respect the decision-making and privacy of everyone involved."
Experts say the man, who goes by the initials M.H. in court papers, might have a chance to find out whether he is the father based on the unusual circumstances of the case. But they all agree that state law and court precedent strongly favor the woman.
"It's his right against hers and the child's," said Caroline Forell, a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law. "My guess is they add up the rights of the child and her and that trumps his."
Mistakes and allegations
In September 2005, M.H. gave workers at OHSU's fertility clinic a container of his sperm to be used to artificially inseminate his fiancee.
(Excerpt) Read more at oregonlive.com ...
So when does he have to start providing child support but have no visitation rights.
I'd suggest that the child's father is the person who provided the sperm. There are good fathers and bad fathers. Some men who provide sperm are bad fathers, some very bad indeed. But it is kind of loose or poetic to say they are not fathers, and it confuses conversation.THe child may have a step father, an adoptive father, a father in the eyes of the law, and any of those "fathers" may not be the father who provided the sperm. But since when is law a canon of reality?
It sounds lovely to talk about the man who takes up the responsibility of interacting with, providing for, guiding, sometimes tolerating a child as being a "real" father. But doing so creates problems. For example. A man begets a child on his wife, has a very large insurance policy with the future child as beneficiary, very much wants to be a father and husband, and a piano falls on him. He's not there for the mother and child, so he's not the father, some would say. So does that mean the child is not his child and therefore does not get the payout of the policy? Of course not?
Then "Father" is going to end up meaning different tings in different ssituations.
The child, I think, has a father. The Mom, the child, OHSU, of the courts may decide that the father is not allowed to do major parts of the job of fathering.
I'm babbling, maybe, but this comes down to unnatural gnosticism, where the notion of the "real" father is divorced from the notion of the "natural" father. I don't think it's good discourse or good thinking.
"Prevented"? I'd like to hear exactly how. I don't believe for a second that they were physically prevented from leaving until she swallowed a pill she didn't want to swallow. If that had actually happened, the couple should have called police immediately, and filed charges of false imprisonment right after a detour to a hospital emergency room to get her stomach pumped.
Amazing, though, that fertility clinics don't cover all this in written contracts in advance. This sort of error is quite rare, and I guess they don't want to remind people that it can happen. But they can pretty easily transfer liability to the patients involved, if the patients have contractually agreed in advance to do X in the event of an error, and then subsequently refused to do X after an error actually occurred.
Under well-established common law, a man is the legal father of any child born to his wife during a marriage. Unless a state's case law or statutory law has explicitly overturned this, or there has a been a court-ordered termination of paternal rights in a specific case, the common law holds. Plenty of men have found this out the hard way, when they were forced to pay many years of child support for a child born to their ex-wife during the marriage and biologically fathered by another man.
Under well-established common law, a man is the legal father of any child born to his wife during a marriage. Unless a state's case law or statutory law has explicitly overturned this, or there has a been a court-ordered termination of paternal rights in a specific case, the common law holds. Plenty of men have found this out the hard way, when they were forced to pay many years of child support for a child born to their ex-wife during the marriage and biologically fathered by another man.
I always think of this quote. "Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men". Jean Rostand
My relative weightings:
His rights: 0.0%
Her rights: 0.0%
Best interest of the child: 100.0%
It seems to me that we need some rules related to the operation of these clinics. First, all "natural" rights to your sperm and egg must be waived to start the process. It is a business and a contract, not natural procreation. Something goes wrong, there must be a legal fix to the problem (money) that doesn't ruin a child's life.
This is a counter-example to the law of supply and demand.
I don't know Oregon law, but that would be the case under common law, and remains the case in many if not most states. He would also be the legal father if she'd gone out and gotten pregnant from a one night stand and DNA tests proved conclusively that he was not the biological father.
The origin of this obviously predates DNA testing, though it was applied even in cases where the racial characteristics of the baby obviously ruled out the husband as the biological father. Remember that under the original concept of marriage in English-U.S. law, the wife was not a full-fledged person, since she was female and not eligible to enter into contracts on her own behalf (among other things). The husband was the only legally responsible person in a "nuclear" family (the children being below the age of majority), and he was therefore legally responsible for the wife and children -- that included being responsible for the wife getting pregnant by another man. The law was also not willing to give any man other than the husband any rights whatsoever to a baby which emerged from the husband's wife/property, because that would have been interfering with the husband's ownership rights to his wife.
"What if the sperm donor is a hard-core moonbat of some kind?"
Then the hospital should not have donated the sperm.
Now the father has the right to see that this child is raised as he sees fit irrispective of his background.
There's plenty of law that applies here. There was certainly a contract, and the clinic clearly didn't uphold it's part of the contract (which apparently didn't give the clinic the right to avoid any responsibility for this sort of error as long as they offered the woman in question a morning-after pill in time to prevent the pregnancy). This clinic will end up paying through the nose, and any individuals found to have played a part in withholding the truth from the man will have a heck of a tough time hanging on to their medical/nursing licenses or getting malpractice insurance in the future. However, none of that avoids complications in the child's life, or in the life of the man who (apparently) became the biological father of a child without his consent, due to the unauthorized actions of the clinic staff.
The clinic shouldn't have "donated" the sperm to an unauthorized recipient, no matter what the qualities of the man who produced it. And I respect a clinic which does not deny services to someone because s/he fits their personal definition of a "moon bat". Remember, the clinic did not select this man to be an anonymous donor; he was there to provide sperm to his fiancee, not to some woman he'd never met. I would hope they would screen out people who would widely be regarded as "moonbats" as anonymous donors (but in practice, clinics don't get involved in selecting sperm donors -- anonymous donor sperm comes from independent sperm banks, with both the bank and specific donor selected by the female patient).
Let's just hope that the DNA test results show that M.H. is not the father. Problem solved....
Test tube procreation is wrong. In-vitro is wrong. All this stuff is wrong. It should be outlawed.
I hope I made my opinion clear.
The clinic did the right thing by announcing they blew it, but the donor seems way too serious about taking the child from the parents she/he has and won't accept the fact that given the circumstances its not their fault. Most men would be mad, but I doubt they would do what he is trying to do and take the kid from the mother.
Don't they make babies the old-fashioned way any more?
"Test tube procreation is wrong. In-vitro is wrong. All this stuff is wrong. It should be outlawed.
I agree.
See my post above this one.
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