A divided Florida Supreme Court ruling this week on assisted reproduction methods raises the prospect of children having three parents—or at least raises a new complication for couples seeking to have kids with outside help.
By a narrow 4-2 margin, the state’s high court on Wednesday concluded that under Florida statute a sperm donor did not automatically relinquish his parental rights because the artificial insemination was done at home instead of at a fertility clinic.
A majority of justices agreed to overturn two lower court decisions that had previously found that Angel Rivera had given up his parental rights when he agreed to provide his sperm to Ashley Brito and Jennifer Salas.
Brito used an at-home artificial insemination kit. According to court documents, Brito and Salas got married after confirming the pregnancy and began raising the child together. However, they separated a little more than a year later. Soon afterward, Rivera filed a petition seeking recognition as the child’s legal father.
The majority justices stressed that they were not concluding that Rivera is entitled to parental rights. Rather, the opinion focused on whether the governing state law, passed in 1993 and amended in 2020, applies to people who artificially inseminate outside a clinic setting.
Justice Jaime Grosshans, writing for the majority, said the law did not apply to Rivera.
“Taken together, it is clear that this section of newly enacted statutes, as well as the one amended statute, focused almost exclusively on providing a legal framework for gestational surrogacy issues and laboratory-based reproductive procedures—i.e. ART, [assistive reproductive technology],” Grosshans wrote.
Joining Grosshans in the decision were outgoing Justice Charles Canady as well as Justice Jorge Labarga and Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz.
Justice John Couriel, who wrote a dissenting opinion that Justices Meredith Sasso and Renatha Francis concurred with, said the majority “gets that job wrong” and that it was clear that Rivera was clearly a donor whose actions were covered by the law.
And Couriel argued that the court’s decision opens the door to circumstances not authorized by the Legislature.
“But now, the majority authorizes Rivera to become parent number three,” Couriel wrote. “This might be good or bad policy by the Court’s lights, but it is not our law.”
Couriel added, “The Court seems bashful about the full import of its reasoning, stopping one step short of what it knows will be an odd result indeed under Florida law: declaring Rivera a child’s third legal parent. And that is understandable. Whatever hoops Rivera and other donors in his position will have to jump through, so too will people who have relied on their donations as they await the courts’ sorting out of claims that the statute on its face resolves.”
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This article appears in Jan. 01 – 07, 2026.