“Posthumous Parentage”

In Living in a Science Fiction Novel: Inheritance Rights for Posthumous Conceived Children, Brian Carnell says that he occasionally thinks he's a "minor character stuck in a science fiction novel."

I'd have to agree. The situation he's discussing is that of a little girl, Sayana, whose father died of brain cancer two years (!) before she was born. (He had saved some sperm in a sperm bank before he started chemotherapy.)

Sayana's mother is now a single parent "living on a teacher's salary," and wants her to receive social security "survivor benefits." Normally there'd be no question about this, but the poor Social Security administration office is in a bind: the kid didn't exist when the father died, the mother wasn't even pregnant until a year-and-a-half later, and yet she really is his daughter, his biological descendant.

Brian raises another question about dividing up estates: there are potentially thousands or millions of "unborn children" to anybody who's donated to the sperm bank. When these donors die, how can the estates be divided up with so many legitimate offspring still unborn?

The whole mess raises so many issues, calls so many things into question, that it's no wonder the courts don't want to deal with it, that they're begging the legislatures to pass some laws to make the courts' jobs easier.

Think about it: can they say that life starts at conception, and only those which were conceived before the parent's death are to be granted death benefits or part of the estate? That sounds logical, perhaps, but then that means they've defined life (individual life) as starting at conception. See the problem? Now the whole abortion issue comes into play, because if life starts at conception, then abortion is killing. If instead they say that life starts at birth, then they have to deal with the other side of the abortion-rights issue, and what about the children who were already conceived when the father died?

Quite the house of cards, and this is just the beginning. Science seems to have outrun our ability to decide between right and wrong (should Sayana get the benefits or not?). The whole situation seems to be wrong, somehow.

Part of me just wants to laugh, but part of me finds it all quite repulsive.