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Thursday, January 3, 2013

Kan. case highlights legal issues for sperm donors

William Marotta, who is being asked by the state of Kansas to pay child support after providing sperm to a same-sex couple, speaks about his ordeal at his attorney's office in Topeka, Kan. on Monday, Dec. 31, 2012. Angela Bauer told The Topeka Capital-Journal on Saturday that she and her former partner, Jennifer Schreiner, are "kind of at a loss" about the Kansas Department for Children and Families' recent decision to file a child support claim against William Marotta. Marotta provided sperm that was used to artificially inseminate Schreiner three years ago. (AP Photo/The Topeka Capital Journal, Jeff Davis)

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) ? A state law being used by Kansas officials trying to force a sperm donor to pay child support is outdated, the man's attorney argues. But experts agree that he put himself in a precarious legal position by getting involved in a lesbian couple's do-it-yourself artificial insemination.

Kansas law states that a sperm donor is not the father of a child if a doctor handles the artificial insemination. But the law does not specifically address the donor's rights and obligations when no doctor was involved.

That was the case in 2009, when William Marotta answered an online ad for a sperm donation for Angela Bauer and her then-partner, Jennifer Schreiner. The three signed an agreement that they believed severed Marotta's parental rights, and Schreiner became pregnant.

But because they didn't go through a doctor, the state argues, Marotta is the legal father and should be responsible for about $6,000 in public assistance Schreiner received to help care for the child. The state also wants him to pay child support, though neither woman is asking for money.

"I don't fault the state for this," said Corey Whelan, who runs workshops for lesbian couples interested in having children through the New York-based American Fertility Association. "I don't think this is a homophobic issue. I think this is a financially driven issue."

Whelan said her group has a long-standing practice of advising single women who want a child to work with doctors and attorneys. She said avoiding professionals is "a buyer-beware proposition."

But money can be a factor. Artificial insemination generally isn't covered by health insurance and usually costs between $2,000 and $3,000, said Steve Snyder, a Minnesota-based attorney and chairman of the American Bar Association's group on assisted reproduction technology.

"It is happening a lot," Snyder said. "Go on amazon.com, home insemination kit, $29.95. A lot of LGBT couples use them. I have a lot of cases involving those types of kits or people who intend to use them."

That sets up a tricky legal situation, said Dr. Ajay Nangia, the former ethics chairman of the American Society of Andrology, a national medical group for male reproductive health.

"The problem is the guy exposed himself to a situation that made him potentially liable because he had no legal protection," said Nangia, an associate professor of urology at the University of Kansas Hospital.

Still, Ben Swinnen, one of Marotta's attorneys, said his 46-year-old client cannot be declared the father of the now 3-year-old child because of the written agreement with the two women. Nine states have laws saying a sperm or egg donor is not the parent of a child conceived through artificial reproduction.

"The state of Kansas is lagging behind in following the trend," he said. "It is a freeze, in my opinion, on artificial insemination and alternative family settings."

He also believes that state officials' pursuit of Marotta's case in Kansas, where voters approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in 2005, is designed to reinforce the definition of a family as a married man and woman, and their children. He said the state is trying to send a message that, "anything else is no good."

But the Kansas Department for Children and Families, which started pursuing Marotta in October, argued in a court filing Wednesday that at least 10 other states require a doctor's involvement in artificial insemination for a sperm donor to be protected from having to pay child support.

"It's a commonsense law," said Washington state-based attorney Mark Demaray, a past president of an organization for attorneys who handle assisted reproduction legal issues. "It's very common for them to have to go through a doctor's office and get a sworn statement from the doctor that he or she performed this procedure."

Marotta is trying to get the case dismissed. A hearing originally scheduled for Tuesday in Shawnee County District Court has been delayed until April.

Bauer and Schreiner have told The Topeka Capital-Journal that they're backing Marotta in his fight. The Associated Press left a phone message Thursday at a number listed for Schreiner, and she didn't respond to a Facebook message. Listings for Bauer were incorrect or out of service.

A spokeswoman with the Department for Children and Families said earlier this week that the agency routinely tries to track down the biological father when a single mother seeks public benefits for a child, as Schreiner did in January 2012, and require him to pay child support.

The effort, the state says, is to potentially lessen the burden on taxpayers. Officials in Gov. Sam Brownback's administration declined further comment Thursday about Marotta's case.

It wasn't immediately clear Thursday whether other states have pursued sperm donors for child support. However, lawsuits have been filed in cases where mothers seek support from donors.

Last year, a state appeals court in California sided with a Texas man who was sued for child support by the mother of two children conceived from his sperm donation. In New Mexico, a state appeals court in 2008 ruled against a sperm donor who saw the children regularly and had agreed to pay some child support but didn't want the amount increased.

In 2002, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws suggested that states have laws specifying that "a donor is not a parent of a child conceived by means of assisted reproduction" and that no donor could be sued to support the resulting child.

Kansas' law, enacted in 1994, was based on an earlier model law from the same Chicago-based group, but legislators haven't revised it. The group's website says the newer language has been enacted in nine states, including Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas.

"It was updated as science progressed," said Eric Fish, legal counsel for the group. "It continues to progress more quickly than the law."

___

Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Mo. Follow John Hanna on Twitter at www.twitter.com/apjdhanna

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-01-03-Sperm%20Donor-Child%20Support/id-22d7644642e24b47a94baf7016d2b480

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Critics say grounding shows Arctic drilling danger

This aerial image provided by the U.S. Coast Guard shows Rear Adm. Thomas Ostebo, Incident Management Team commander, observing the Royal Dutch Shell drilling rig Kulluk aground during an overflight off a small island near Kodiak Island Tuesday Jan. 1, 2013. No leak has been seen from the drilling ship that grounded off the island during a storm, officials said Wednesday, as opponents criticized the growing race to explore the Arctic for energy resources. (AP Photo/U.S. Coast Guard, Sara Francis)

This aerial image provided by the U.S. Coast Guard shows the Royal Dutch Shell drilling rig Kulluk aground off a small island near Kodiak Island Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013. No leak has been seen from the drilling ship that grounded off the island during a storm, officials said, as opponents criticized the growing race to explore the Arctic for energy resources. (AP Photo/U.S. Coast Guard)

Chart shows the largest oil reserves

This aerial image provided by the U.S. Coast Guard shows the Royal Dutch Shell drilling rig Kulluk aground off a small island near Kodiak Island Tuesday Jan. 1, 2013. No leak has been seen from the drilling ship that grounded off the island during a storm, officials said Wednesday, as opponents criticized the growing race to explore the Arctic for energy resources. (AP Photo/U.S. Coast Guard)

This image provided by the U.S. Coast Guard shows the Royal Dutch Shell drilling rig Kulluk aground off a small island near Kodiak Island Tuesday Jan. 1, 2013. A Coast Guard C-130 plane and a helicopter were used to fly over the grounded vessel on Tuesday morning. The severe weather did not permit putting the marine experts on board the drilling rig, which is near shore and being pounded by stormy seas. (AP Photo/U.S. Coast Guard)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) ? The grounding of a petroleum drilling ship on a remote Alaska island has refueled the debate over oil exploration in the U.S. Arctic Ocean, where critics for years have said the conditions are too harsh and the stakes too high to allow dangerous industrial development.

The drilling sites are 1,000 miles from Coast Guard resources, and environmentalists argue offshore drilling in the Arctic's fragile ecosystem is too risky. So when a Royal Dutch Shell PLC ship went aground on New Year's Eve on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Alaska, they pounced ? saying the incident foreshadowed what will happen north of the Bering Strait if drilling is allowed.

For oil giant Shell, which leads the way in drilling in the frontier waters of the U.S Arctic, a spokesman said the grounding will be a learning experience in the company's yearslong effort to draw oil from beneath the ocean floor, which it maintains it can do safely. Though no wells exist there yet, Shell has invested billions of dollars gearing up for drilling in the Beaufort and the Chukchi seas, off Alaska's north and northwest coast.

The potential bounty is high: The U.S. Geological Survey estimates 26.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas exist below Arctic waters.

Environmentalists note the Beaufort and the Chukchi seas are some of the wildest and most remote ecosystems on the planet. They also are among the most fragile, supporting polar bears, the ice seals they feed on, walrus, endangered whales and other marine mammals that Alaska Natives depend on for their subsistence culture.

"The Arctic is just far different than the Gulf of Alaska or even other places on earth," said Marilyn Heiman, U.S. Arctic director for the Pew Environment Group.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC in 2008 spent $2.1 billion on Chukchi Sea leases and estimates it has spent a total of nearly $5 billion on drilling efforts there and in the Beaufort.

Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith said the company has a long, successful history of working offshore in Alaska and is confident it can build another multidecade business in the Arctic.

"Our success here is not by accident," Smith said. "We know how to work in regions like this. Having said that, when flawless execution does not happen, you learn from it, and we will."

The drill ship that operated in the Beaufort Sea, the Kulluk, a circular barge with a funnel-shape hull and no propulsion system, ran ashore Monday on Sitkalidak Island, which is near the larger Kodiak Island in the gulf.

The ship had left Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Island under tow behind the 360-foot anchor handler Aiviq on Dec. 22. It was making its way to a Pacific Northwest shipyard for maintenance and upgrades when it ran into a vicious storm ? a fairly routine winter event for Alaska waters.

The tow line snapped Dec. 27. Shell vessels and the Coast Guard reattached tow lines at least four times. High wind and seas that approached 50 feet frustrated efforts to control the rig, and it ran aground on a sand and gravel beach.

Shell, the drill ship operators and transit experts, and the Coast Guard are planning the salvage operation.

Calmer weather conditions on Wednesday allowed a team of six salvage experts to be lowered by a helicopter to the Kulluk to conduct a three-hour structural assessment. Information the team gathered will be used for the final salvage plans, officials said late Wednesday in a release. Also taken to the Kulluk was a state-owned emergency towing system for use in the operation.

The state of Alaska has been an enthusiastic supporter of Arctic offshore drilling. More than 90 percent of its general fund revenue comes from oil earnings. However, the trans-Alaska pipeline has been running at less than one-third capacity as reserves diminish in North Slope fields. State officials see Arctic offshore drilling as a way to replenish the trans-Alaska pipeline while keeping the state economy vital.

In September, two Shell ships sent drill bits into the U.S. Arctic Ocean floor for the first time in more than two decades. They created top holes and initial drilling for two exploratory wells. Drilling ended on the last day of October.

The grounding in the North Pacific is not a wellhead blowout in the Arctic, and not a drop of oil has been detected in the water. But environmental groups say it's a bad sign.

Drill rigs in Arctic waters could be affected by ice any time during the four-month open water season, said Heiman of the Pew Environment Group. The other threats ? near hurricane-force winds compounded by cold and darkness ? were seen in the grounding, she said.

"We know that in the Arctic and in the gulf it's not uncommon to have pretty high seas, and you have to take precautions," she said. "If you're going to dill in those types of conditions, or even move vessels in those conditions, you have to have strong, Arctic-specific gear and equipment and safety training. It has to be very vigorous, and I don't think we're there yet."

Shell was fortunate in some ways, she said, that the Kulluk experienced problems near Kodiak.

"Up in the Arctic, you are 1,000 miles away from any Coast Guard station and the kind of response they were able to deploy in Kodiak," she said. The Coast Guard the last few summers has staged equipment and personnel in the Arctic. That has meant a couple of helicopters and possibly a cutter, Heiman said. It in no way can be compared to the Gulf of Mexico and the resources available for BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster.

"It's remote. There are no roads. There's no real, true spill response capability like you would have in the gulf, where you have ports and harbors and boats and fishing boats and vessels everywhere," she said.

Shell has said its preparations will allow it to operate safely far from the Coast Guard base. Like a backcountry camper, Shell has promised to carry all the response equipment needed to the isolated drilling sites: a fleet of more than 20 response vessels that could respond in either the Beaufort of the Chukchi.

Shell spokesman Smith said the company remains confident in its ability to operate safely.

"We encountered severe weather basically all summer long in the Arctic," he said. "While it was challenging, the personnel and the assets and the rigs performed very well."

When a massive ice flow moved toward the drill ship operating in the Chukchi after less than a day of drilling, Shell released the vessel from anchors and moved out of the way.

"As disappointing as that was, given how long we had waited to start drilling ? we were only a day in ? we had the time and made the decision to disconnect from anchors and safely move off," Smith said. "That's how responsible operators work in the Arctic, or anywhere, really."

The Aiviq has towed the Kulluk more than 4,000 miles and experienced conditions seen before the grounding, Smith said. It was no accident, Smith said, that additional vessels were standing by in Seward.

It's too soon to know what led to the grounding, Smith said, but the failure of the Aiviq's engines for a time after the initial separation and the inability to re-establish an ideal tow connection were factors.

"It's clear that a sequence of unlikely events compounded over a short period of time, underscored by the complete loss of power to the engines of the Aiviq," he said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-01-02-Shell-Arctic%20Drill%20Ship/id-c51ef33284c041df95169b6b4ba421f7

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Wednesday, January 2, 2013

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