Surrogacy and Inheritance Law

Medically assisted reproduction, new technologies have helped hundreds of thousands of people to create families. They also created new legal issues that some countries do not know how to deal with even until now.

The use of IVF (in-vitro fertilization) is on the rise. It is estimated that there are currently over 600,000 frozen embryos in the United States alone. Only 10% of them will be implanted for full term pregnancy. The rest can remain frozen for dozens of years and potentially grow into babies after their parents had already died.

Could “orphan” embryos be destroyed by a clinic or should they remain frozen forever? If they are born, who will their legal parents be and what will their inheritance rights be? Finally, who has the right to decide embryos’ future in case of the divorce?

Those questions are no longer hypothetical. There were cases when both parents died leaving behind frozen embryos kept in liquid nitrogen at an IVF clinic cryobank. Or when a woman decided to get pregnant using the embryos she created with her late or former husband.

The lawyers at Rosjurconsulting law firm can help you to deal with all those questions and resulting complications. We will explain you what potential situations you have to consider when embarking on surrogacy journey and will listen to your opinion to transform it into legal documents to follow your instructions. Those documents will help managing embryos in case something happens to you, your spouse or your marriage.

Apart from the embryos, there is another potential pitfall that’s created on the intersection of surrogacy and inheritance law. We’re talking about cases when a single man who fathered a child via surrogacy in order to save time and money on lawyers wishes to register the surrogate as child’s mother and to have her name on the birth certificate. Such a father may then be gone and live happily for many years, but in case of his death before the child turns 18, all his property and assets will go to a surrogate as she is the mother of a minor child and might have a full custody.

No matter how well prepared you are, medically assisted reproduction is a complicated issue and requires a professional approach and professional legal advice before the medical part of the program would start – to say nothing about professional legal guidance throughout the whole process to avoid any complications in the future.