What are legal concerns when using donor eggs and donor sperm?

So there are now possibilities to have donor eggs and donor sperms as for women and men who are infertile but wish to have a child. And, again, this is very much state specific and locality specific. So, oftentimes, what will happen is a couple will seek a donor egg from an unrelated individual and say husband’s sperm, and then the wife would be the carrier. Or you can seek of a donor sperm or you can seek both. And so it can be actually many more people can end up being involve in reproduction than we think of traditionally. It’s not really any longer just a mother and a father. And there are certain issues which have legal and in some ways moral as well.

There are for example now literally, there are markets for donor eggs and people advertising they're willing to pay tremendous amount of money for eggs depending on where they come from. There are as in papers they're willing to pay money for Harvard graduates and they go into $20,000, $30,000 per egg. It’s certainly a question of whether or not that’s appropriate thing to do. And at some point probably legislations will get to address in it. Right now, in the United States, it’s a free market and people do those things. Surprisingly, there is not that much of a market for sperm. It’s mostly for eggs.

That said, oftentimes, depending on how the transaction is structured, the question comes up, “Well, who is the parent?” So, for example, there can be a situation where you can have a wife’s egg, a husband’s sperm, but for whatever reason the wife is unable to carry the child. So, they will find a third person to actually carry the child to term. Now, the child is 100% biological child of the let’s just go for simplicity sake a married couple, it’s a husband’s and wife’s child but is simply being carried by another person. Well, and the question is, “Who is the parent?” And the answer very much depends on what state you’re in. For example, in Illinois, it’s really the birth mother, not the biological mother. The birth mother is the mother unless the couple and the gestational carrier and the doctors and a couple of lawyers really take affirmative steps before the child is born, to file certain paper for the court and get a court order to record the biological mother and the biological father as the parents on the birth certificate. Failing that is actually the birth mother who will be recorded as the mother, including potentially if she is married, her husband will be recorded as the father.

Now, that can be corrected later on, but then it takes even more paperwork. In some states, for example, Texas, paid surrogacy is flatly prohibited; if you have a friend who’s willing to do it for free, that can be permitted but you cannot pay someone to be a surrogate parent. California, on the other hand, is a much more free-for-all market. So, there are a lot of things that are really going on right now. People now are going abroad to hire essential surrogates abroad. It’s recently been reported in places like New York Times that people hire foreign women, particularly in India, to be their surrogate carriers. So, there are a lot of legal and moral issues there, especially if you’re hiring somebody from abroad, because then who knows what law governs is it. U.S. law or is it Indian law or…?