Opinion ID: 1313999
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: the uniform parentage act

Text: The only California statute defining parental rights is the Uniform Parentage Act (hereafter also UPA). (See Civ. Code, § 7000 et seq.). [2] The Legislature enacted the UPA to abolish the concept of illegitimacy and to replace it with the concept of parentage. ( Adoption of Kelsey S. (1992) 1 Cal.4th 816, 828 [4 Cal. Rptr.2d 615, 823 P.2d 1216].) The UPA was never intended by the Legislature to govern the issues arising from new reproductive technologies such as gestational surrogacy. Nevertheless, the UPA is on its face broadly applicable, and it is in any event the only statutory guidance this court has in resolving this case. The provisions of the UPA extend[] equally to every child and to every parent, regardless of the marital status of the parents. (§ 7002.) The parent-child relationship defined by the UPA accords a child's parents both rights and obligations. (§ 7001.) A primary focus of the UPA is the determination of paternity and enforcement of financial responsibility. (§§ 7006 [actions to determine paternity], 7012 [specifying financial support obligations].) When a child is born by gestational surrogacy, as happened here, the two women who played biological roles in creating the child will both have statutory claims under the UPA to being the child's natural mother. The UPA permits a woman to establish that she is the natural mother of a child by proof of ... having given birth to the child.... (§ 7003, subd. (1).) Thus, a gestational mother qualifies as a natural mother under the statute. ( Ibid. ) Alternatively, the UPA allows a woman to prove she is a mother in the same manner as a man may prove he is a father. (§§ 7003, subd. (1), 7015 [permitting actions to establish a mother and child relationship using parts of the UPA applicable to the father and child relationship].) A man may demonstrate he is a child's natural father through genetic marker evidence derived from blood testing. (§ 7004, subd. (a); Evid. Code, §§ 621, 892, 895.) Accordingly, a genetic mother may also demonstrate she is a child's natural mother through such genetic evidence. Here, both Anna, the gestational mother, and Crispina, the genetic mother, have offered proof acceptable under the UPA to qualify as the child's natural mother. By its use of the phrase  the natural mother, however, the UPA contemplates that a child will have only one natural mother. (§ 7003, subd. (1), italics added.) But the UPA provides no standards for determining who that natural mother should be when, as here, two different women can offer biological proof of being the natural mother of the same child under its provisions. Thus, the UPA by its terms cannot resolve the conflict in this case.