Who's your daddy? Or your other daddy? Or your mommy? Why reproductive contracts should trump genetic ties.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Columns

THE RESPONSIBILITIES of a parent have never been simple. Three recent cases highlight just how convoluted those chains of responsibility can get, and how fickle the courts have been in weighing genetic parenthood against the deals would-be parents have struck with their partners.

Case I: Sean Hollingsworth and Donald Robinson Hollingsworth are legally married in California and are registered as civil union partners in New Jersey. The two husbands arranged for Donald's sister, Angelia Robinson, to serve as a gestational surrogate carrying embryos produced using sperm from Sean Hollingsworth and donor eggs. In March 2007, Robinson sued for custody of the twin girls she bore, alleging that she had been coerced into being a surrogate.

Case 2: A November 17, 2009, New York Times Magazine story described the case of a Pennsylvania man identified as Mike L, who discovered through genetic testing that the 5-year-old girl he thought was his daughter was in fact the child of his wife's co-worker Rob. Their marriage dissolved immediately. Two years later, his former wife married Rob, but she continues to receive child support for her daughter from her former husband.

Case 3: Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins were joined in a civil union in Vermont in 2000. In 2002 Miller bore a daughter, Isabella, by means of artificial insemination. The couple broke up in 2003. Now Miller, the biological mother of their child, has become an evangelical Christian. She refuses to allow Jenkins visitation rights with their daughter, claiming that such visits violate her new religious principles.

Issues related to genetic ties run through these cases. In the New Jersey case, one of the gay men is the genetic father of the twin girls, while the surrogate has no genetic relationship to them. Nevertheless, the New Jersey Superior Court judge ignored the contract between the surrogate and the gay couple, allowing Angelia Robinson to contest custody on the basis of the state's famous Baby M case of 1988. In that decision, in which a surrogate mother decided to keep a baby she had carried on behalf of a heterosexual couple, the New Jersey courts invalidated surrogacy contracts, ruling that they were against public policy.

In the messier case of Mike L, the Pennsylvania courts decided that he must continue paying child support because he had agreed to provide the money when his ex-wife told him (before she remarried) that the girl's genetic father would not support the girl.

And...