There was a case of that happening with a lesbian couple who split up, but the donor and couple in that case didn't go through the proper channels. They basically went the turkey baster route rather than finding a donor through a sperm bank.

I don't think there are any examples of someone donating reproductive material through proper channels later being on the hook for child support.

No, absolutely not - there have been hundreds of thousands of people conceived this way and not one documented case of child support when an actual fertility clinic has been used to conceive.

Laws with far more precedence than this have been changed by courts. Such a change should come with a significant amount of forewarning, but given the situation there isn't much one can do even with sufficient forewarning.

Really the way to fix that isn't enforced ignorance but proper and ironclad severence that says - no donors have no parental rights or responsibilities unless they agree to adopt/marry in later. No matter how convenient it would be to bill the donor instead.

AH yes... the 'punish the poor men' argument. In reality, such laws will lead to powerful men able to abscond their paternal responsibilities by having a good lawyer, while poor men remain indebted to their offspring (as they should be of course).

It isn't about the men or the women. The whole point of an actual sperm or ova donation arrangement is to separate the genetics from the social in having children. Sex and rich or poor it shouldn't matter - the arrangement is specifically to aid fertility - allowing the custodial parents full rights and thus the responsibilities while giving minor compensation to the genetic donor who agrees because the cost is minor to them and they can live an undisrupted life. Without honoring the fundamentals the system breaks down.

The point is proper donors should have no parental responsibilities! It should be impossible to dodge actual relationship support with it or misconduct. Dirty fertility doctors who use their own sperm for all patients? Yeah hit them with 47 counts of child support.

Similarly it would be reasonable to have requirements for eligibility in exchange for the "severance" to ensure the child(ren) will be no more likely to require state support than a similiar couple reproducing directly - changes in circumstances can happen to anyone of course.

> The whole point of an actual sperm or ova donation arrangement is to separate the genetics from the social in having children.

The issue here is that I fundamentally do not believe it is at all ethical to do this.

The laws should be fixed to not allow those kinds of ridiculous cases.

Yes they should, and others too (see my GP response above). Anonymity, such as it was, helped prevent risk. Now we need a law to limit the liability of a donor.

Are there already such laws?

Anonymity created many, many risks.

There are documented cases of genetic half-siblings having a sexual relationship because they did not know they were donor conceived.

There are documented cases of suicides from adults finding out they were conceived from anonymous sperm donation and that "their Dad was not their Dad."

90% of donor conceived adults do not know they are donor conceived - and so all have provided incorrect medical history information to their doctors. Does that not seem like a risk?

Now how to apply such a law that wouldn't also apply to people who reproduced in the standard fashion but don't want to disclose whom they did so with?

Case three doesn't have much to do with anonymity. Even a non-anonymous donation doesn't mean your parents would tell you about it while still a child

They're more related than it might immediately appear - purposefully choosing an anonymous donor over an open ID donor is often correlated with shame and secrecy around infertility, whereas choosing an open ID donor signifies acceptance, empathy, and a lack of shame/secrecy.

A much higher % of people conceived with an open ID donor are told of their origins.

It isn't a concern for adoption, so I don't know why it would be a concern here. Courts care about the legal parents of a child, not the genetic parents.