Surrogacy

Perez Hilton is now a father to a baby boy! The openly gay blogger, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira Jr., took to his eponymous blog Wednesday afternoon in a post titled "A Very Important Message from Perez" to share the news "directly from me, right here. " "I am ready to announce that earlier this month I was blessed with the birth of my first child, a beautiful and healthy baby boy - with lots of hair on his tiny head. My family is overjoyed at this newest and most cherished addition," the 34-year-old wrote.

When surrogate parenting agreements come undone, the new reproductive technology forces the courts to play the role of Solomon. With a wisdom appropriate to the assignment, the state's 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana has applied common sense to several groundbreaking cases. The most recent establishes that a couple, though now divorced, remain the parents of a child produced in happier times by a surrogate with donated egg and sperm.

I read in the Sept. 14 Times about John Buzzanca, who has been absolved of his financial responsibilities to a little girl, Jaycee Louise Buzzanca. This case illustrates much of what is so terribly wrong with the whole concept of surrogate parenting and why we should simply not be permitted to mess around with nature in this horrendously intrusive and self-serving way. Buzzanca and his wife obtained an egg and a sperm from unknown donors. The egg and sperm were inserted into a healthy woman who agreed for a sum to carry this child to term and deliver it to the Buzzancas.

Dozens of aspiring parents and the women they hired to be surrogate mothers filed a class action lawsuit this week against a Modesto-based surrogacy agency that abruptly shut its doors and stopped returning phone calls, leaving hundreds of thousands of client dollars unaccounted for, according to the allegations.

In the year since the New Jersey Supreme Court restored Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould's parental rights in the Baby M case and declared surrogacy-for-pay illegal, five states--Michigan, Florida, Indiana, Nebraska and Kentucky--have banned surrogacy, raising to seven the number of states that prohibit the practice. Legislatures in more than a dozen states, including New York, are considering anti-surrogacy legislation. Louisiana had banned surrogacy before the Whitehead decision.

In the first case of its kind in the nation, the state Supreme Court agreed Thursday to decide whether parental rights can be granted to a woman with no genetic link to a test-tube baby she bore for a childless couple. The justices, in a brief order, set aside for now a state appeal court ruling rejecting legal claims by Anna M. Johnson to a child created from the sperm and egg of Mark and Crispina Calvert of Tustin.

Based on real events, "Moment of Truth: A Child Too Many" (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) brings into focus some of the injustices that can result from commercial surrogate pregnancies. The two-hour drama reveals the problems that develop when a surrogate, Patty Nowakowski (Michele Greene), discovers she's carrying twins.

A state appeals court has moved swiftly to resolve the plight of a child born to a surrogate mother but left legally parentless and cut off from child support after the Orange County couple who arranged her birth got divorced. The 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana ordered the man, John A. Buzzanca, to resume paying child support for 2 1/2-year-old Jaycee Buzzanca--at least until a three-judge panel hears the case.

Experts on family law and child development Friday criticized a judge's ruling that gave a surrogate mother and biological father joint custody of a 16-month-old girl conceived through artificial insemination. "The judge can't be serious," said James B. Boskey, a family law professor at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, N.J. "I don't see how this could possibly be healthy for the child. This is precedent-setting in a very dangerous way." Dr.