Family Law & Fertility Law Blog | Louisa Ghevaert Associates

Direct to consumer genetic testing: a family and fertility law perspective

A decision to undertake a direct to consumer genetic test is a big step. In addition to offering insight into an individual’s health and disease risk, it can help trace a biological parent and biological relatives. In doing so, it can raise complex and challenging legal and wider issues about paternity and maternity, infidelity, the nature of family relationships, birth certificates, financial and inheritance claims and citizenship and nationality.

Why we need fertility and wider law reform part III

There is increasingly a need to implement intelligent fertility and wider law reform and develop new policies and practices. The world around us is changing at pace and we must adapt to a range of powerful and inter-connected factors: declining fertility levels, fallout from the Covid-19 global pandemic, changing geopolitics, intensification of genomic, digital and AI technology revolutions.

The importance of legal parentage

The significance of legal parentage should not be underestimated. Legal parentage establishes a legal parent-child relationship in law and it confers status, as well as various important legal rights and responsibilities. It does not always follow biological parentage or birth registration. Furthermore, the law can be complex, particularly in cases involving assisted conception and modern family forms, and challenging to resolve when disputes arise.

UK fertility treatment trends: what’s next?

The HFEA’s latest data, published on 30 June 2020, paints a largely positive picture of fertility treatment in the UK in 2018 before the Covid-19 pandemic. Its main points and analysis indicate that IVF birth rates had increased for patients under 43 years and that on average, about one in every four embryos transferred in 2018 resulted in a live birth. However, the massive disruption, uncertainty and loss caused by the advent of the global Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed our public and private lives.

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