"Transgender man, 34, loses legal battle to be named as the father on his child's birth certificate as Supreme Court refuses to hear his case"

For known donors Clymene but there really is nothing to stop men spreading their sperm around, through 'natural insemination' or via the Turkey baster method. Not all sperm donors go through the proper channels so there are no real limits to how many families or children there can be involved. Not that I have any ideas how you police it and I do understand reason from the PP who mentioned not putting the name of the father on the BC due to rape or domestic violence. The family courts aren't always so great at protecting children and mothers and that would be another way for men to abuse....

But the BC should maybe just be a record of birth and not custody/parental responsibility. It hasn't worked like that at all, it's always be automatic and rightly so. I can't really see why it should be any different from how it is now but I do think children should know about their genetics and parents won't always be honest with their kids and at least have the chance to find them if they choose to as adults.

SJ won't go looking for his sperm donor dad if he is raised to believe his mother is his father and Freddy is a magic seahorse human.

Donors in the U.K. are limited to 10 families so there is no danger of 300 siblings.

Unfortunately, many people choose to get their donor gametes from outside the U.K. where the rules around limits/anonymity are less strict. Spain and Greece for example are popular places to get donor eggs because women living in poverty sell them.

I'm not sure how you legislate gamete tourism.

There’s different rules about what if anything the law allows adults who have been told or discovered they were born from sperm or egg donation to discover about the donor, including if the donor's name is part of what they can find out. The rights to information depend on when the person was born. There’s a link here that explains it by year of birth: www.dcnetwork.org/solo-mums/your-childs-rights

People born through surrogacy don’t seem to automatically have any rights to get information about whose egg, sperm, or embryo were used for their birth or to know who was pregnant and gave birth to them, depending on how their conception and subsequent legal arrangements happened.

It’s complicated because of all the variables in arrangements between the adults before the birth and afterwards but The Law commission full consultation document has a whole chapter (chapter 10) about the child’s information rights that is worth reading. It describes problems like genetic links from surrogate to child via her egg not always being recorded. Or the original birth certificate records not always being legally available to the person to access, even if they ask for them.

‘10.38: As we mention above, it appears that, contrary to the position on adoption, it is not possible in England and Wales for a person born as a result of a surrogacy arrangement to access their original birth record. The General Register Office agree that, under the current law, it is not possible for it to provide the linking information that would allow a child born of surrogacy to obtain their original birth certificate.’

They also quote academic research that says that parents are more likely to tell their child that they were born from a surrogate than they were to tell them that donor egg or sperm were used, including when they’d been born from the surrogates’ own egg.

The Law Commission suggested legal changes to give new information rights and consistent record keeping. This would include where no IVF was used in the surrogacy. It’s good the law commission covered this because there’s clearly a serious problem when key information isn’t recorded at all, or it has been recorded somewhere but isn’t accessible to people. None of this would cover surrogacy from other countries, though which would bring up all the same questions.

www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/surrogacy/

Right so Whittle became their father through adoption.

I've heard an argument (and I don't necessarily agree) that there should be several people named on a birth certificate:

Who provided the egg
Who provided the sperm
Who was pregnant
Who has parental responsibility/is the legal parent (and whether they adopted the child or got a parental order or adopted as a stepparent etc)

As IVF and surrogacy increases and is set to boom by all accounts and children are born from 'double donors' I think it really is quite important to know who you're related to. I've seen too many "I have 300 siblings" type stories to preside me otherwise.

Freddy wants to be recorded as father or parent and the above would go some way to that but I just can't get past children not having a mother listed. Just the word not being on a BC at all.

I read Sophie Beresiner's column in the Sunday Times at the weekend and she explains that the parental order for Baby M is delayed due to Covid. She understood why Rebecca, the surrogate mother, was listed on the birth certificate (good!) but not why Rebecca's husband was. Mr Beresiner is the biological father (and they used another woman's eggs) but by law Rebecca's husband is, and it's so wives aren't exploited by their husbands. How is this not bleeding obvious?

If sperm donors were the legal fathers of the children born from their donations then they would also be financially liable for their upkeep which I am guessing a donor wouldn’t want! The law expressly states that a man who donates sperm through a registered clinic does not become the father of any children born as a result.
As the birth certificate doesn’t even require details of a father and will often register someone who isn’t the biological father, I can’t see any need for sperm donors needing to be registered on birth certificates.

Also if you make it a requirement for fathers to be registered then that will have a detrimental impact on women fleeing domestic abuse who don’t want the father involved at all. Or rapists who get the victim pregnant.

You're right Word, I understand now that a sperm donor is not named on the birth certificate but can be found on the HFEA registry...so not anonymous but no parental responsibility and can remain a secret for life as it relies on the mother or parents being honest.

I still find that odd as sperm is pretty key to the process and whoever provides it should be named for the purposes of the child, though I also understand why commissioning parents get a new birth certificate with their names on once the parental order is agreed and the birth certificate for adopted children exists but remains sealed. I don't know exactly how it works in surrogacy arrangements. I think it is the same so the surrogate mother remains on the sealed version.

My only issue with this is if the child is not told of their genes and where they came from. I just think children deserve to know the truth of where they came from.

If you get married there is space for both parents on the marriage license. (Only recently did they bother to include a space for the mothers job).

There are laws about not marrying your relatives which I guess may have been an original reason that birth certificate information was put together? Presumably with population growth and people moving around more widely these records are less of an issue now.

I presume it would be recorded as mother on a marriage licence the same as birth certificate. How has this worked so far for gay couples? There must be many families that are NC with parents so maybe they allow some combinations on a marriage license.

In that video, Freddy mentioned the mother having to adopt her own child(ren), I cant recollect the full circumstances though.
If you only have to take things from that list upthread though, I can’t see how you can’t be legally named father except Freddy’s case is different as Freddy gave birth to the child and is therefore the mother

Also
When the Gender Recognition Act 2004 came into force in April 2005, Whittle obtained a new, male birth certificate. He then married Sarah (née Rutherford) later that year.[15] They had been cohabiting since 1979.[9] They have four children by artificial insemination, the first of whom was born on 13 October 1992.[9][15] In April 2006, they jointly adopted the children, making Whittle their legal father.

Ah 1996? Pre GRA then.

Sorry I missed the end quote, that was entirely from the article, though I agree.

I get especially cross about lies told to children about their origins or heritage. The children will not know their biological roots of half of their family and it's entirely feasible that one day they could meet half-siblings and never know.

I do hope the children know how they came into being and they are able to find their biological father if they do choose.

From Wiki
The Whittles' efforts to gain recognition of Stephen as their children's legal father led to X, Y and Z v. The United Kingdom before the European Court of Human Rights in 1996.

On Whittle, from this uncommongroundmedia.com/from-shaft-to-wpath-stephen-whittles-influence-on-trans-politics/

“This is a husband and father who went as far as the European Court of Human Rights so that his long-term partner could be impregnated through artificial insemination and his name could be on their children’s birth certificate.” That’s a deliberate lie, isn’t it? I suppose it’s no more of a lie than the lie on the birth certificate of a child whose mother knows that her husband isn’t her baby’s father, because the baby is a product of donor sperm. This is the problem with law. Experts can make the law tell us lies, and then they can bully and gaslight us by saying the lie must be the truth, because the law says so.

Then it all goes a bit quiet, presumably because Whittle has ticked off the top items on the to-do list. Whittle is legally a man, with a birth certificate with an M on it; married to a woman although not in a same-sex marriage; and the birth certificates of the children that Rutherford gave birth to and Whittle adopted bear Whittle’s name.

Technically, with a GRC, legal documents stating sex-male, what Stephen Whittle did was acquire the same ability to have non-facts on his children’s birth certificates as single mothers and heterosexual couples who have children from any combination of donated gametes.

If you give birth - you are the legal mother. Birth certificate does not say this is the person whose egg gave you half your DNA. And if heterosexual marriage or civil partnership, the bloke is the legal father. Or if not the bloke who turns up or provides a document saying he is the father - is the legal father. Nothing to do with whose sperm joined with egg.

If Stephen Whittle turned up with anything on that list stating sex - male, he probably is on the birth certificates as the father. Lesbian couples would have second parent.

Other than a birth certificate, on what record is a 'legal father' noted?

I think this is just another example of why the GRA is a bad law and should be repealed. Legal fiction, completely ignored conflicts with sex as a protected characteristic, no annual limit of GRC...more holes that Swiss cheese! Can anyone think of any other law that has been shown up to be a badly thought out law?

The child also has rights under the Convention for the Rights of the Child. Freddy did say that no one is denying who gave birth to the son but I can't see how that is true as Freddy is denying Freddy's status as mother.

He can be the legal father without having to change the baby’s birth certificate surely? Isn’t Stephen whittle the legal father of his children?

This is why the GRA should never have permitted a birth certificate to be amended retrospectively. A birth certificate is a record of an event and the details are correct at the time. If you later get a GRC that doesn’t change the fact that your sex was correctly observed when you were born. It shouldn’t be possible to alter that record, just as I can’t get my birth certificate changed to reflect a later change of name.

Aesop no, GRA says you can’t change a BC of an existing child because their parent has gained a GRC. So your dad couldn’t do that without your consent (and not with your consent either!). Not legally permitted currently. And consent or best interests is an interesting argument around BCs since by definition children don’t have a say in that.

It’s the people who gain their GRC before a child’s birth that GRA doesn’t specify about. I can see why Freddy is testing the GRA as a law because it is full of holes, but in this aspect, arguably the principle is already set by Parliament within the GRA in favour of not changing anyone’s else BC in light of someone else’s GRC.