Collaborative Reproduction And The Evolution Of Gender Roles

Join us as we sit down with award-winning science writer, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, to discuss the expanding concept of what it is to be a parent, and important considerations surrounding collaborative reproduction. In this interview, Rachel touches on the following:

•    The technologies, social customs, and policies driving the future of collaborative reproduction.
 •    How reproductive technology plays a central role in the way many families are planned. 
 •    How collaborative reproduction can expand what it means to be a family.
 •    Why accepting a nontraditional family opens doors for LGBTQIA+ families.
 •    Reducing the social stigma of being a single parent.
 •    How co-parenting works when having a child with someone you don’t plan to marry.
 •    Collaborative reproduction and the evolution of gender roles.
 •    The complexities of an “open-source family,” modern families that integrate donors, surrogates, co-parents, and other non-biological relationships.
 •    The dangers of anonymous sperm donation and how important transparent parenting can be.

If you would like to speak with one of our attorneys, please call our office at (503) 227-0200, or visit our website at https://www.pacificcascadelegal.com.

To learn more about Rachel can help you, you can visit her website: https://www.lehmannhaupt.com/about

Disclaimer: Nothing in this communication is intended to provide legal advice nor does it constitute a client-attorney relationship, therefore you should not interpret the contents as such.

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Modern Family Matters, a podcast devoted to exploring family law topics that matter most to you. Covering a wide range of legal, personal, and family law matters, with expert analysis from skilled attorneys and professional guests, we hope that our podcast provides answers, clarity, and guidance towards a better tomorrow for you and your family. Here's your host, Steve Altishin.

Steve Altishin  
Hi, I'm Steve Altishin, Director of Client partnerships here at Pacific Cascade legal. And today I'm here with award winning science writer Rachel Lehmann-Hauptto talk about the expanding concept of what is it to be a family and important considerations surrounding collaborative reproduction. Hey, Rachel, how you doing today?

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
I'm great. It's great to see you. Thank you for having me on. I'm excited for this topic, especially to be talking to people with legal minds.

Steve Altishin  
Well, I used to have a pretty good one. Okay, before we even start in, it's just a fascinating subject, and I'm really wondering if you could talk about yourself a little and how you ended up coming to write about this topic.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
I'm a journalist by training. And my first book looked at women's new choices, we have more economic power, because we're more educated women are therefore putting their economic power ahead of their procreative power, having children older, and because Mother Nature has not really changed our biological clock and millions of years, we're still running into because of modern choices and changes, we are running into more fertility challenges, and therefore, more heavily relying on advanced reproductive technologies. And so that book was called in her own sweet time, egg freezing in the new frontiers of family. It also was a personal journey, I, you know, was in that same boat and decided to freeze my eggs when I was 37 years old. And that happened because the guy I was with wasn't on the same page with me about having kids, I was ready, he wasn't. And that relationship ended, unfortunately. And I decided rather than have what my friends call a land grab marriage, which is just to marry somebody for the sake of having kids didn't seem right or fair, I think love develops naturally. And, and I didn't want to have my biological clock dictating my decisions around that. So I decided to put the cart before the horse and have a baby on my own as a single mom by choice because I had the economic power and family support to do so. And my son was born when I was 40, in 2012. And since then, I've become very interested in sort of expanding the spectrum of how reproductive technologies are changing the shape a family. In those years that my son was born, egg freezing was made, was taken off the experimental list by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the increased rates of success for reproductive tech went up the trends towards people having children older, went up, marriage was suddenly get a LBGT key plus marriage was suddenly made legal, which opened up a whole new opportunity for gay people to have families and unfortunately, I mean, although I'm going to tell you later on that there is hope in the future for that biological reproduction among same sexes. Yes, that's a bomb drop in early on, but it will keep people watching it, you know, two men need a certain part a gamete. Two women need a certain part a sperm. And sometimes, you know, people just ended up having children on their own like I did. And so I needed a certain part. So that choice to have to go outside of the traditional nucular family for biological material genetic materials, sort of has untethered the nucular family and created new structures in which there are other new players in the family. And the questions I wanted to know were, what the shapes of these families looked like and how they were operating and what the new language was, what the new legal structures were. And so I started reporting a new book that became this one re conceptions.

Steve Altishin  
I love it. I love it. And that leads into my first question, you sort of started talking about, you know, nuclear family. You know, the traditional nuclear family...that's changing, isn't it? 

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
It is changing. Yes. The traditional nuclear family? Well, it's interesting when we say traditional nucular family, it's always taken a sperm and an egg to make a baby. Right. So that hasn't changed in millions and millions of years. We evolved that way. And it used to be actually like in Paleo times that the traditional nucular family, which is sort of a man and a woman, to children, you know, in, in sort of Biblical sense. You know, that wasn't always the case, like in Paleo times, there were people raise their kids in tribes. So it's like collective collaborative parenting has was was the thing. And it wasn't like two people got together and got married and had a baby, it was like, people had sex, and they had babies and the tribe raised them. And there was actually some argue more equality in those with men and women in those times, and that eventually evolved into pairing marriages, and then that eventually evolved into I think agriculture really sort of created the need to grab land and therefore have land ownership. And therefore, men tended to own the land and therefore needed wives to help them with it, and children to help them with it. And so that kind of evolved into more of what the nuclear family looks like today, or has looked like, and some extent, you know, the nuclear family was also really helped, like, made possible like in the 1950s. And I'm kind of jumping way ahead from agriculture age to industrial age. But um, it was really made possible after World War Two with a lot of incentives from the government. And, you know, and women sort of took over the home front, and men kind of went out and hunted and gathered, and that evolved. But then, you know, in the 1960s, that sort of started changing as women got more economic power. I mean, it's very interesting that the housewives of the 50s became the feminists of the 60s. And that rebellion really had to do with taking ownership of our own sexuality of our own lives. And, you know, people started getting divorced, and, and to take ownership of their own lives, people started having children and many other ways. At that time, still, there were, you know, there were always gay people, there were always single people, but you know, there was much more marginalized. And, and also, you know, with all of that, relationships have now really become about love. I mean, women don't need to get married to have financial support anymore, and neither demand. So you know, we now come together for love. And as we've all realized Modern Love is quite complicated and varied.

Steve Altishin  
Yeah, that is the truth. Yeah, collaborative reproduction, we talked a little before about this. And because this terms, collaborative in the legal world is like collaborative divorce. And that's, that's kind of where that kind of thing is, working together to get divorced. So I love the concept that you're talking about here. So I guess the elephant in the room question is, well, what is collaborative reproduction, and you know, how does it work?

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
it was actually coined by a lawyer named John Robertson. And it really was speaking to the opening up of the ability to have a family in gay families. And obviously, the fact that they needed parts and genetic parts from other people. So you know, two gay men would need an egg. And often it would be their friend, their lesbian friend, to gay women would need a sperm donor would sometimes would be uncle donor. And it was very, you know, kind of, it was a kind of a wild west when gay life was more marginalized and not legal. So the collaborative reproduction part is sort of where the legal structure started coming in to create protections for these kinds of families that had to use different parts. And I think it's really important to make the distinction that to some extent, parenting has always been collective. But never before at this level, or intensity, has reproduction become collective.

Steve Altishin  
I'm imagining that kind of not driving or helping or pushing this forward, is the fact that science has kind of entered this arena, in ways that it wasn't entered for a long, long time. And, you know, you made a comment once that that, you know, mothers can do a lot of things to be a mother that maybe it wasn't before and fathers, both gay and straight, can do a lot of different things to be fathers and that whole how it's taken a lot of different folks and created you know, the parental hood, the like you say, the nuclear family or non nuclear family. 

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Yeah, I mean, I think what you're saying is, is that you can be a mother in many, many ways now and you can be a father in many ways now and sometimes you're a mother by logically, you provide an egg to somebody who becomes the social mother or the actual mother. But that needs to have a legal, you know, setting. Sometimes you provide a sperm to father a baby. I mean, my son was conceived with a sperm donor, he fathered my son, that's technically his biological father, but he has no social involvement. You can be a father by the guy that I'm going to be with could end up being an adoptive father of my son. You know, you can be a mother by being a surrogate carrying gestational carrier, counting a baby for somebody and then giving birth to it and handing it off to the mother. So there are a lot of new kinds of roles for mothering and fathering. And therefore the need for new legal structures around this. 

Steve Altishin  
Oh yeah, I'm just thinking, you know, , it's interesting. Co-parenting is one of those also legal terms that, again, generally is used for post divorce. We're now divorced, we're now not living together. So now, we're not parenting, we're co parenting. But, you know, you talk about how co parenting it that's just not necessarily related to divorced or separated couples anymore. And their CO parents can be a whole lot of different people.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
That is true. And it's become a gray area. I mean, it used to be traditionally co parenting was you married, and then you divorced, and you came up with a custody agreement to co parent collaborative agreement and divorce? You know, now, a lot of you know, there are cases where women are. What are they doing God, there's so many nuanced cases, they are getting pregnant, accidentally or accidentally on purpose. And then, you know, making co parenting agreements with the men that they get pregnant with. I mean, I think that there's a moral and legal question around that. Does the man have an obligation to be the father to a child that he did not choose to parent? You know, it's obviously very nuanced about, you know, birth control, and who's who controls that. But if a woman chooses to have a baby, so, you know, I mean, I know somebody who that happened to and now she, you know, her son has a legal father, and they co parent back and forth, it goes back and forth between, you know, like a divorce, but they were never married, and they were actually never even together. So there's that I mean, and then, you know, there are cases where, I mean, there was a famous case that I write about in my book about Jason Patric, the actor and his girlfriend, you know, they kind of had an on again, off again, relationship, she was older, so therefore, Rose embryos with his sperm, to potentially have a baby together, then they broke up, and she decided to implant the embryos, with his sperm without his permission, and have a baby. And then he went and tried to get custody of her son. And she claimed she was a single mom by choice, so that he didn't want to have custody. So I, you know, that was like, created a whole legal battle around like, what, who, what is a sperm donor? And what's a co parent? I mean, one of the reasons why it's complicated, and one of the, you know, and I even when I was thinking about having my son, you know, I did have a couple conversations with guys, friends that were like, should we should we have a kid together, and then just, you know, raise them as friends, which is, you know, very common, and in the gay community, it's happened for years, and, you know, years and years and years. And some people make it work well, but I kind of ended up deciding that maybe it was the best choice and that the more legally safe choice was to go through a sperm bank and actually have a clear delineation of what the leak was, you know, that this guy that helped father, my son was not the legal father, you know, and, you know, and I did that with the hope that maybe, you know, I would meet and fall in love with somebody that, you know, I don't know, necessarily would have to, like, take on being a father or adopt my son, potentially, but maybe it would be a male presence in his life.

Steve Altishin  
You talk a little bit about computer, freezing eggs, freezing embryos, and that's been around for a while. And, you know, typically, that tends to require a lot of states and adoption, a termination of parental rights. I mean, there's things that have to come. So that one is protected, that this is just my kid, not yours, and the other is protected that 10 years down the road, I'm not going to get a support order. So I mean, those things happen. But you said now, there's new technologies and the technologies. I'd like to talk about those a little bit. You talk about burgeoning technologies, talk technologies in the near future, and then technologies that are maybe a little far away but that are crazy. They are so fascinating. So let's, let's talk about the technologies that is intertwined, obviously, with this whole concept.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Yeah. And I think the one that's kind of most interestingly intertwined their two most interesting intertwined with this new concept. But one, there's an there's a new technology called IVIG, which is that you can actually take a as any cell in the body, it was started with blood cells and turn them into sex cells, which ostensibly, it hasn't happened yet. But you know, could make, you know, two people of the same sex be able to convert one of their cells into a, the what the one that the missing part, and have a baby together. Now, there's a lot of steps to the science to get there. And we're probably many, many years away from that. But there was actually just a story in Nature magazine, the journal Nature, that they did it with two male mice. So two male mice have now procreated children, so it is not like really sci fi, it's just there's going to be a lot of steps that need to take, and obviously, that's going to change the game 100% Because they will each be legal, biological parents, and I mean, it probably doesn't take divorce out of the picture, but at least you know, there's not going to be the gray areas of, you know, friends or donors. I mean, you know, I think that legal structures since marriage has gay marriage has become legal is have changed a lot. I mean, they're, you know, it's very clear now what, you know, contracts around donor eggs and donor sperm and, and particularly for gay men around surrogacy, I mean, it used to be often there, like lesbian friend carried the baby or even have the baby for them. And you know, that was that was would often become an issue because like it was her biological child, but she was handing it off to, you know, the two dads and now, you know, there's gestational carriers that they get paid to carry babies for gay men. And also, single dads, like, There's a story in my book about a single dad that really wanted to have his own baby, and he got an egg donor and a surrogate and had it and now he is with a woman who is adopted his baby, and she didn't have kids. So you know, I mean, all kinds of new families. Oh, so anyway, that so that that new technology could potentially take, you know, take that all of that off, I mean, that that's probably 20 years away, but then again, you know, who knew that we were going to be able to do IVF? I mean, whoever, you know, in the 1940s, did we ever think that babies would be conceived in petri dishes? And I think, you know, the other interesting technologies, you know, like Gattaca, I mean, artificial limbs. Like, what if you know that you took the cert, there's, you know, there's being a surrogate as hard and they're pushed hard by the industry. And obviously, there's a financial incentive. So you know, a lot of surrogates have a lot of babies to make money. I mean, I did a story for a new publication called proto Life Media called portrait of a professional baby maker that looks really into the life of the surrogate, which is wonderful in many ways, but also, you know, challenging and, and there are health problems. So, you know, right now there are artificial wombs being developed really more for the sake of, of carrying preterm babies because, you know, the number, the right there's been a huge rise in preterm pregnancies. Some people think it's because women are having children older, it's kind of unknown, really what the real reason is, but so there are some scientists working on ways to transfer a preterm baby earlier and earlier, into an artificial womb, that would be sort of like the equivalent of an incubator, but more than that, you know, emulates the uterine environment. And, of course, that makes you know, the feminist bioethicists spin out and think, Well, hey, you know, Child, child child carrying a child is labor. And it's a, you know, dangerous to some extent, and it takes women out of the workforce. And you know, what, if we outsource pregnancy period to artificial limbs, and, you know, maybe there maybe there is a future and maybe Gattaca is actually not too far away.

Steve Altishin  
You talk about also one that I thought to me was really, really fascinating was the potential for having three genetic parents and you know, when I kind of reading them kind of going, Well, now that is going to have to create some more laws, because now there are, if there are three genetic parents, there are three parents who may have the right to decide how the baby is raised, how the kid is raised, you know, if there's a divorce, what if one of them divorced and, I mean, what do you do with that? But I mean, talk about that a little I just love that. I mean, I like that concept because it makes you know, that you can spend a sperm and egg on two gay guys, you can spend a sperm and so that you don't necessarily know what Well, but it still is one or the other, but but the idea of three parents is fascinating.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Well, you know, and it's legal in England, it's not in the United States, it's been quite controversial in the United States, although there is a doctor working on it. So it's called it's, it's called a mitochondrial transplant, basically, where the mitochondria of a egg is transferred into the mitochondria of another egg. And then, you know, inseminated with a sperm. So technically, there were there, the baby has the genetics of all three parents. Now, the reason that this technology has been invented is a couple of reasons. One is because there are mitochondrial diseases that get passed down through the mother. And it would it would therefore, you know, eradicate passing down that mitochondrial disease. And then to some extent, also there, you know, is the argument that maybe could help infertility because like, say, you're 48 years old, and you really want to have a baby, but your egg is, and your eggs are still not viable anymore, but you can still have a eggs and potentially you could borrow the egg mitochondria of a younger woman's eggs and plant it and then have a biological child, even though it would carry the Gen networks of three parents. So that that is, you know, possible.

Steve Altishin  
That's a whole generation of new law.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
It's a whole generation of new law. And I mean, of course, like the like sci fi version, and I say this almost in a comic way is like, you know, now polyamory is a thing like maybe like, just like a polyamorous threesome want to have a child this way? I mean, it's kind of the Wild West, but you got to just put it out there.

Steve Altishin  
You talked earlier about gametes. I remember gametes. Very, very about that much from school. But talk about that, it'd be artificial. I think you said artificial gametes.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Artificial gametes. Artificial gametes are artificial gametes. You mean like actually like creating artificial gametes.

Steve Altishin  
That's what it sounded like. It's like, you know, any human body can create them both?

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Oh, well, that I think goes back to the IBG technology, it's creating a gamete cell, a set cell from another cell in the body. So technically, like a blood cell could be converted into again, then in that case, it would be called an artificial gamete.

Steve Altishin  
So all these things can happen now. 

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Lots can happen, but they can't--

Steve Altishin  
Not that one. 

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Yeah. They can't produce that yet. 

Steve Altishin  
Yeah. And more ways that you can that there can be families created, kids born, parents, become parents. There's gotta be some issues and challenges going on. But all of that. What are some of those complexities? And those those issues that that are following? All of this this sort of new ways to have kids?

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Yeah. Well, you know, I think the complexity we talked about, is the co parenting issue, like, is it the Father? Or is it the sperm donor? Is the guy if it's a co parenting, like, is he a sperm donor? Or is he a father? I think that's a real gray area that is happening. I mean, I think that case that I mentioned, the Jason Patric case really caused sperm donor laws to change in California. And and it went all the way up to the California Legislature. That was That's how serious that issue is, from a legal perspective, like, who's the dad and who's a sperm donor? So I think it's a real gray area. And you know, and I think the other areas are, you know, the industry in general is very, very, very poorly regulated. So because, you know, there's an economic incentives for these fertility clinics to sell sperm and sell eggs, you know, women go in and they realize, you know, I can I can get paid $50,000 to be a surrogate, I can be paid a lot of money to donate my eggs. So they go through these multiple cycles to donate their eggs and kind of push their body to the mat. And then, you know, guys, it's a lot easier to donate sperm. But, you know, one of the things that has happened is that they there's an incentive to sell sperm. So you know, they will there and it's changing. It's getting better now, but you know, there have been cases where, you know, kids end up having hundreds of siblings because of lax policies around worm donation. And, you know, that's kind of nutty. I mean, I did a story for Newsweek years ago about a guy in Michigan who was a sperm donor, and I think, and he found out that he had 400 offspring.

Steve Altishin  
Wasn't there a movie about that?

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Well, yeah, well, yeah. Yeah.

Steve Altishin  
Not a real movie.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
With Vince Vaughn, yeah. I mean, and what's so interesting is he was he was very self conscious about it. And he ended up working with this guy named George Church at Harvard, and I had his genome sequenced and put his genome out in for public records. So all these kids could go back and understand their genetics. I mean, he realized, you know, so that was like a big Act of as a father in a way.

Steve Altishin  
Yeah. Yeah. One of the ones just sort of, you know, being in a law firm. Yeah. I think about new talk a little bit about co parenting, and not marrying at all. I mean, it may be even not cohabitating. But still co parenting. And without, I'm sure, hopefully without the intervention of the court. But you know, in every state, what the courts say that if, if there is an issue, we don't care necessarily how much you guys agreed to do this, that that who would pay for this that imagine that that sort of co parenting don't plan to marry? So what do I do? Do we draw up a contract? Kind of like a parenting plan? I mean, well, I'm not.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
I'm not a lawyer. But I think that that would probably be wise. Yeah, I mean, I think it can be get very complicated. And also, this is, this is like, the big sort of underlying messages, the book, it's like, I think, in the, when you're making these decisions, they don't necessarily need to be the traditional decisions, but they need to be the decisions that are in the best interest of the child. And so I think if you're going to go, you know, they're all these websites now where people can go on and find a co parent, if I have a baby with it's like online dating without the merit dating part. It's like they date to have a kid together. And one, one guy who runs a base called Moto family.com joke joked that the name of his thing really should have been date to inseminate. I mean, so that's wild, right? Like, so yeah, I would say that there needs to be there needs to be some sort of institutionalization legal structure, unless you're just, you know, really good about that, you know, really, really, really solid and what your values are around that. But you never know, right? We'll never know. You never know, in a nuclear family, either. You never know, in marriage, either.

Steve Altishin  
Yeah, it all like, you know, you really tied everything together when you said best interests of the child. Because that's really the parenting. Not just legal, but probably emotional, spiritual, whatever. Job. That's, that's good. That that's always first. 

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
The best interest of the child, it is 100% true. And I mean, it's, it is interesting, you know, I kind of made the decision to do this on my own because I was, you know, I was like, co parenting sounds so complicated. You know, so it could get complicated. I mean, you know, the research has shown that kids have single parents, single moms by choice are actually more psychologically sound than the children, many children of divorce and divorce, it's really hard on kids. Worse. It really, really is. So, you know, I mean, I've seen it firsthand with some of my son's friends, you know, they're, it's, it's just, you know, where they're like going back and forth between these houses with like, multiple other kids, step kids and, you know, dating parents, and it's complicated. So, you know, I mean, it's it, it is, it is, you know, out of control. And, you know, to some extent, you know, I'm not like trying to toot my own horn, but like, I'm kind of a traditionalist in a way, like my son, I might be on my own. But my son comes home to one home every day, every day after school. And you know, we sit down and we have dinner as a family every every night together. It's kind of like the 1950s in a way.

Steve Altishin  
Yeah, no, I totally understand that. It's, wow, we blew through 30 minutes.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
It's a good topic. It's juicy.

Steve Altishin  
It's a terrific topic. And before we go, though, I do want you to let people know who are listening, how they can get a hold of you, if they would like to talk to you about this?

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Yeah, well, I have a website. It's lehmannhaupt.com. And you can see both my books the first book in our own sweet time egg freezing in the new frontiers of family and this book preconceptions modern relationships, reproductive science and the unfolding future of family so they can reach me through their website. I follow me on Instagram at our Lehmann helped. They also Uh, you know, I'm available. I love speaking and I'm available for speaking particularly, you know, in law to law firms. You know, I think it's, I think it's a new area of family law, that and with many, many different interesting, you know, nuances and so, you know, I'm, um, you know, I'm putting myself out there as a speaker, you know, doing seminars or, you know, speaking to legal conferences or legal groups about these topics.

Steve Altishin  
Well, that that is really important because the law has to follow this technology, it's going to. 

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
Yes, exactly, so please spread the word. 

Steve Altishin  
Oh, you bet.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
And there's a speaker's page on my website that talks about all the topics that I can speak on, including the concept of collaborative reproduction.

Steve Altishin  
Oh, I will look at that. Again, thank you again, Rachel, for sitting down and talking to us about collaborative reproduction, which is very technical, and then non technical, and then widespread and then complex, but you did it in a way that that it's actually was kind of easy to understand. That's not easy.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt  
I'm happy to hear that. Oh, yeah, it was.

Steve Altishin  
I can understand it. Anyway. Good. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, everyone else for joining us today. And until next time, stay safe. Stay happy be well.

Outro:
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