Quote:
Originally Posted by Kobi
We also have no idea what the financial agreement or input is for the non-biological mother. The fact that the mother applied for state assistance implies neither mother had/has the financial resources to support a child at the time.
In referring to the donor, this is a little more complicated to explain. There was a legal method for him to protect himself. Ignorance of the law, attempting to circumvent the law, and failing to protect oneself does not and should not exempt one from the consequences of their actions. A private contract still needs to conform to and adhere to current and prevailing state law. Failing to do so, implies acceptance for the potential for unintended consequences. As such, to my way of thinking, the donor is not an "innocent victim" here.
The only "innocent victim" here is a 3 year old child in need of financial support.
Be interesting to see the results of this lawsuit.
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I've read several articles so far, so I'm not perfectly sure where I read that the donor said he never even took the $50 offered for his services. He thought he was helping out a couple who wanted to have a baby. It's probably not relevant, but that article also said that he and his wife are childless, but have raised one foster child.
The child in this case is now three years old. The mothers most likely contacted the sperm donor at least four years ago. A lot has happened in that time that could have caused a family to seek public assistance, like a huge recession and the foreclosure crisis. It's really unfair to suspect that the mothers knew they couldn't support the child when they conceived. And, I'm sorry to say, jumping to that conclusion about a woman who has now become a welfare mother has an odour of misogyny to it. In my opinion, it's a little classist, too. Sometimes people fall on hard times and they need to go on welfare. It's not our place to judge.
It's unclear whether the biological mother sought public assistance before the couple split up. If, as one article inferred, the request for assistance came post split, there's no difference between her and any other woman left alone to take care of her child/ren after the husband/partner leaves. This is one of the biggest reasons why we have public assistance- So that children hopefully won't starve or freeze to death if their parents don't stay together.
Speaking of going on welfare, I don't know anything about how it works in Kansas, but if they're pursuing sperm donors to recover assistance grants to women with children, I'm going to feel safe assuming that Kansas requires welfare mothers to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to receive a grant. Breathless wants to know how the state of Kansas came to know the donor's identity. If a social worker questions a woman closely she could easily give up that information inadvertently. She might even have simply let it slip that the man was known to her, at which point the social worker might be required by state law to with hold the grant until she disclosed his name.
As for expecting the participants in this mess to know and abide by the law re:sperm banks and doctors, it's not something I would have known about. It's not strange to me that these people wouldn't have known, either. What's more, there have been cases in the past where single lesbians and lesbian couples have been denied access to private sperm banks. Those cases were in the midwest and bible belt, so it's possible that these women might have been turned away from legal avenues in Kansas even if they were wealthy enough to access them. Why is it OK for Melissa Etheredge to collect sperm from her buddy Steven Stills so her wife could make a baby, (or was it Graham Nash?), and not OK for two non-celebrity women to circumvent the sperm bank?
There are many potential victims if the sperm donor is tapped for child support. Every lesbian and gay family with children will be victimised and further marginalised if the court refuses to recognise the non-biological mother as the parent who they should be tapping for support. A decision recognising a sperm donor as the parent over the mother would further erode the status of all lgbt families in Kansas with one biological parent and one non-bio parent.