Recent innovations in assisted reproductive technologies (sometimes referred to as ART) and the attendant vast array of new child-related family-building alternatives are raising new and complex legal issues for family law practitioners in New York and around the country, both in the context of divorce and other areas of family law. With the increasing use of fertility procedures like in vitro fertilization (IVF) and “third-party reproduction” arrangements (including sperm donation, egg donation and gestational surrogacy arrangements), and with other technological advances such as the ability to indefinitely cryopreserve genetic material created in vitro, reproductive possibilities are seemingly endless.
Indeed, today, more people are turning to ART and third-party reproduction arrangements to create families—whether it be to circumvent infertility, to preserve fertility prior to undergoing cancer treatment, to facilitate same-sex couple procreation, or for many other reasons—and, the fact cannot be denied that a rapidly growing number of children are born annually in the United States using ART.
