2 weeks Ago
In the lead-up to having a child, many families make important preparations: taking parenting classes and reading parenting books, choosing medical professionals and lining up a pediatrician, even painting the nursery and getting everything ready for the child’s arrival. But for some families in Pennsylvania, there is a lot of additional legwork that continues well after the child’s birth. Some families are forced to pursue what are known as “confirmatory adoptions” for their children, just to secure parental rights.
These procedures can involve court hearings, burdensome legal documentation, background checks and other clearances if they’ve lived in other states. The process can cost thousands of dollars and take months to complete.Some families are forced to endure these additional steps because of Pennsylvania’s outdated parentage laws.
It’s well past time that we update these laws to better reflect the range of parenting relationships that Pennsylvanians hold — and to protect more families, getting everyone on the same footing.That’s why we’ve introduced the Uniform Parentage Act again this year. The bill, HB350, passed the Pennsylvania House of Representatives last year with strong bipartisan support but, unfortunately, the session ended before the Senate had a chance to consider it.
Now, in 2025, we need to get this legislation across the finish line so that our state’s courts have a clear legal framework protecting the rights of all families. Families in Pennsylvania, including those formed in part through assisted reproduction like IVF and surrogacy, deserve clear guidelines on how to legally establish a parent-child relationship.In addition to providing an option for a voluntary acknowledgement of parentage, which can be done prior to birth in a straightforward process at no cost to the parents, the Uniform Parentage Act would introduce new, strong protections for people involved in surrogacy agreements.
It’s a commonsense policy that reflects best practices and takes into account the technological developments that have allowed so many Pennsylvania families to build loving families that make our state great.Without the Uniform Parentage Act children and families will continue to suffer in the Keystone State because they’ll continue to fall through the cracks in our legal framework. There are many protections and responsibilities that flow from legal parentage — medical decision making, access to benefits, health insurance, child support and more.
Modernized parentage laws also ensure that if something happens to a parent — including death, separation or divorce — the relationship between the parents and their children endure. For children, a legal parent-child relationship is central to stability, security and overall well-being. They deserve to have that clarity on the day they are born, not months or years later.
Our courts continue to struggle with the lack of statutory guidance in this area, most recently in the Glover v. Junior case just finally decided by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In that case, a married couple needed the help of in vitro fertilization, with one spouse being impregnated with sperm from an anonymous donor.
Both individuals fully intended to be parents of the resulting child, but their marriage broke up before the child was born and the spouse who gave birth to the child refused to recognize the other spouse — who was not biologically related to the child — as the other parent. The court recognized that parentage can be established by showing an intent to be a parent of a child conceived and born through assisted reproduction and that Pennsylvania’s statutory scheme is in need of being updated to do the same. House Bill 350 would heed the court’s call for this reform because it includes intent-based parentage as one of the paths to the establishment of the child-parent relationship.
In this commonwealth, families come in all shapes and sizes. Our laws need to provide security and protection for all of them. We have the solution for this problem — the Uniform Parentage Act — and now, it’s up to all of us to get to work and get it passed.
This is a contributed opinion column. The four authors are members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives; Dan Miller, D-Allegheny; Ben Sanchez, D-Montgomery; Jeanne McNeill, D-Lehigh and Sheryl Delozier, R-Cumberland. The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual authors, and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication.
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