Family planning is way beyond what it once was – sex for reproductive purposes. Now, babies are being formed in test tubes and petri dishes in countries all around the world! What follows is an emerging area in the law – Assisted Reproductive Technology, or ART. As usual, the progress of society and the development of cultural trends are far ahead of the law in this specific arena. Said another way, the law is scrambling to catch up with what is trending culturally.
While ART is disproportionately utilized in the LGBTQIA+ community, it is also used in the heterosexual community. ART involves all ways of using technology to get pregnant and to deliver a child; it includes sperm donation, egg donation, IVF, surrogacy agreements, etc. Just as it’s an emerging area in the law, it’s an emerging area in the sphere of mediation/conflict resolution. It behooves mediators interested in this area to learn the lingo used in sperm/egg donor and surrogacy agreements, to build the muscle of cultural competency in all of these modern methods of family planning, to be able to better serve the needs of this clientele.
Seeing as ART is a new area in the legal landscape, donor/surrogacy agreements don’t contemplate all eventual possibilities and co-parenting agreements can turn into convoluted family situations alive with disagreements… hence, ART is rife with opportunities for mediation, particularly the kind of mediation which tactfully addresses the emotional sides of the dispute, understanding they are crucial to successful resolution. When dealing with family planning, emotions are high by definition, and it can be really useful to have a trained conflict resolution facilitator helping families to discuss the issues at hand when crafting a donor agreement or a co-parenting agreement. Obviously, if something “goes wrong” (like an agreement is broken) down the road, that can be the most valuable time to introduce Integrative Mediation.
There was a recent case where a fertility clinic was liable for accidentally mixing up genetic material so three different women carried pregnancies to term, birthing babies that were NOT from their own genetic material (and expecting the babies to be their genetic offspring!). Can you imagine? Picture spending 9 months nurturing a fetus, bonding with the eventual baby to be born, only to find out a test tube was misplaced and this beautiful new creature is not your genetic baby! Then you find out another woman who you don’t know actually carried YOUR genetic offspring to term… Whoa! What would you do? Would you keep the baby you birthed or organize a baby switch to get your genetic offspring (some other woman inadvertently carried)?! These are such juicy and challenging questions.
Given that extremely sensitive family/relational/emotional dynamics are at play, these kinds of ethical dilemmas occur to me as the PERFECT grounds for Integrative Mediation. We want emotionally-attuned mediators to assist in resolving conflicts around family planning since the law doesn’t have a lot to contribute yet and emotions are extremely complex in these types of situations.
