Editing Openai/6940a7dd-57cc-800a-9d04-d5309cb12945 (section)

=== User: 6 adults have 'legal' claim to a child, who should get the child? ===
6 adults have 'legal' claim to a child, who should get the child?
I thought of this very complicated hypothetical and I'm curious to see how people resolve it.

A couple [Josh and Elsie] who are both infertile (their egg and sperm cells don't have viable DNA) would like to have a child.

They find a volunteer sperm donor [Larry] and a volunteer egg donor [Wanda] and their cells are combined in a lab to make an embryo.

The embryo is implanted into a surrogate mother [Hannah], who has a husband [Zeke]. Hannah carries the child to birth and Zeke is present the whole time as support.

However, on the day the child is born, the whole thing falls apart and now everyone wants parental custody. No binding contracts had been signed beforehand (a major oversight but it is what it is).

Josh and Elsie claim that the child belongs to them because they were the ones who set the whole plan in motion. Hannah and Zeke claim that the child should belong to them because Hannah gave birth to the child and Zeke is her marital husband. Meanwhile, Larry and Wanda coincidentally have gotten together in a common-law relationship and are now claiming the child is theirs because it's their sperm and egg that were used to create the child. No couple wants any of the other couples to have custody of the child, although they are all willing to allow the child to have some kind of "aunt and uncle" type relationship with the other couples.

So in total, the child is connected to 6 different adults who could claim to be the child's "parents" in some form. Who gets the child, and why should they have the rights to do so?