Fertility Law for Modern Families with Louisa Ghevaert

Feb 26, 2020

Louisa is an expert in fertility and family law with over 20 years experience. She works at law and policy level in the UK and internationally. Louisa frequently provides expert commentary in the media on fertility, family and parenting law and is a published author on these topics. Her areas of expertise include fertility preservation and treatment, international surrogacy, donor conception, posthumous conception, children and family law.

 

Bio

• Louisa Ghevaert started out over 20 years ago as a mainstream family lawyer and now runs a specialist family and fertility law firm for modern families
• In 2008 she was asked to litigate the first international surrogacy case, where the twins of British parents were born stateless and without citizenship
• Louisa has worked on a number of landmark cases, including embryo storage law, posthumous conception, surrogacy and parental disputes 
• There’s a growing need for fertility law services in the UK
• Modern family is becoming increasingly legally and medically complex
• There’s a lack of international harmonisation of IVF and parenting law
• More people are becoming parents through assisted reproduction who are not legal parents through egg and sperm donation, same-sex couples and single parenthood
• Fertility law is prescriptive, so specialist law can create clear legal frameworks
• The risks and options associated with structuring the family can be worked through legally
• There will be greater deployment of genomic technology in fertility treatment
• Over time we’re likely to see fewer natural conceptions, and more genetically planned parenthood
• Genomics require sensible and informed decision-making
• Gene editing can cure disease, but it can also edit the gene pool
• Issues of consent 
• Regulation for ‘fertility tourism’
• Long term there’s the potential to produce eggs, sperm, foetuses and babies from our own stem cells
• Is widespread genomic screening ethical?
• 3 person IVF involves the nucleus of the egg, the outer shell of another woman’s egg and the sperm
• In the US, genetic screening is often recommended for multiple failed IVF, and recurrent miscarriages
• In the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) https://www.hfea.gov.uk/  changed its rating from amber to red, stating the lack of evidence and added cost without benefits of pre-implantation genetic screening
• Patients and prospective parents need to make sense of biological issues and legacy
• The law in each country is shaped by its society, culture, politics and history
• In the UK it’s illegal to undergo sex selection for social reasons
• The moral concerns of ‘designer babies’
• We need to think about who owns our genetic information and what it can be used for as well political control and bioterrorism
• The increasing age of parenthood
• Building international frameworks and an international regulatory authority for genomic technology
• Two main groups looking to build an international regulatory infrastructure for gene technology: The World Health Organisation https://www.who.int/, National Academy of Medicine https://nam.edu/ and National Academy of Science https://nationalacademies.org/
• In the UK, the implantation of a genetically altered embryo into a woman is currently prohibited
• In the UK, embryo research is only allowed up to 14 days
• In the US, there’s no federal legislation that governs gene therapy
• In 2018 a Chinese scientist announced he had brought to fruition the first gene-edited humans: twin girls called LouLou and Nana, to make them resistant to HIV. The scientist involved was fined heavily and sent to prison for breaching medical and scientific standards
• A Russian scientist has expressed a desire to gene edit to erase deafness
• The postcode lottery of funding access to IVF in the National Health Service
• Vladimir Putin has announced free access to fertility treatment in Russia to boost the declining population
• The two biggest genealogy companies, 23andme https://www.23andme.com/ and Ancestry https://www.ancestry.com/  have tested over 23 million people
• Issues of civil and human rights e.g. using the vast databases to catch criminals
• Finding donor siblings, ‘diblings’ through the databases. Donor anonymity was lifted in 2005 in the UK
• Donor anonymity in Spain

For further reading:

https://louisaghevaertassociates.co.uk/why-we-need-fertility-law-reform-the-paradigm-shift

To find out about Louisa Ghevaert and her legal practice: www.louisaghevaertassociates.co.uk