Will Sarah Jessica Parker's Surrogate Get Visitation Rights?

A surrogate mother gave birth to twin girls [2] for actors Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker in Ohio on Monday. The celebrity parents are ready to take the newborns home and leave the birth mother in the Rust Belt. Does the surrogate have any rights now that the children are born?

Not if they used Parker's eggs. Surrogate mothers who are not genetically related to the child have had little success in obtaining any kind of parental rights. But surrogacy is an enormously complicated and unsettled area of law, and different states take different approaches. In surrogacy-friendly states, like Ohio and California, a judge issues an order, either before or immediately after the delivery, recognizing the genetic parents as the legal guardians, and directs the hospital to do the same. As part of the process, the surrogate normally waives any right to contest custody. In other states, the intended mother may have to go through an adoption procedure. Still, as long as the surrogate is onboard, any state will eventually grant custody to the intended parents. Once legal parenthood is established, the surrogate has no legal relationship to the child—not even visitation rights.

(Read the rest of this article [3] at Slate [4].)