Moral dilemma

The other day, while talking to my dad, he posed a moral dilemma. It was more than that, since this is a real case that has taken place in Italy recently.


Four (or six, depending on the sources) couples go to a hospital for assisted fertility treatements. One of the women gets pregnant with twins, but when she goes to get her babies tested for genetic abnormalities, she and her husband discover that the babies aren't theirs. There's been a mix up with the implanted embryos.

It isn't yet known whether another couple has been implanted with these woman's embryos, and if so, which couple this is, but there is another couple who is sure the babies are theirs and are threatening to sue for the children.

So. Who's the mum? The woman who goes through the pregnancy or the woman who provides the genetic material? Who are the parents?

My immediate answer was that the parents are the genetic parents (I hesitate to say biological, is there anything more biological for a mother than to go through a pregnancy and give birth?), and I still think that, if the embryos weren't donated for a couple who couldn't conceive on their own, the birth woman isn't the mother. She has the right to have an abortion since she is carrying the babies possibly against her will, but she doesn't have a right to them (unless the genetic mother gives them up). My dad thinks I'm wrong though. He thinks that it's more complicated than that, that the birth woman has as much right to the children or more than the genetic mother.

Do any of you have a different idea?

(Hint: The Italian bioethics committee has said that the correct (morally correct: in Italy, the legal mother is the woman who gives birth to the children) thing to do is to share the rearing of the children between the two couples, which is problematic in the sense that it isn't yet known whether a) another couple is pregnant with "this" couple's embryos, or b) who the actual parents of "this" couple's embryos are.)