La Filiació derivada de les tècniques de reproducció assistida: una nova classe de filiació?

Abstract

Filiation, known as the marital status which links parents with their children, must be determined according to the law in order to produce legal effects. The Spanish Civil Code includes the traditional rules of both biological and adoptive filiation but does not stipulate any legal standard related to assisted reproduction. With the purpose of stating the determination of filiation derived from assisted reproduction, the Law 14/2006, from 26th of May, about assisted human reproduction, includes several specific rules but, for the rest, it refers to the general rules which are decreed at the Civil Code. This causes a dysfunctional set of rules when considering that cases, since the Civil Code is inspired by the called biological truth. The Catalan Civil Code, for its part, has its own regulation about this subject and confers a different legal treatment in cases where assisted reproductive techniques have played a distinctive role. The main aim of this work is to examine how filiation can be extrajudicially determined when conception was achieved due to assisted reproduction. It will be of interest the study of the Spanish and Catalan legal framework for more controversial issues such as post-mortem reproduction or double motherhood