SOCIAL SECURITY Court rules on benefits for children

The woman in the case became pregnant 10 months after her husband's death.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
A child conceived using frozen sperm after the death of the father should be eligible to collect Social Security survivor benefits just as any other child whose parent has died, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
Although fatherhood after death is still rare, such cases now occur often enough to have attracted the attention of policy-makers and judges.
"Developing reproductive technology has outpaced federal and state laws, which currently do not address directly the legal issues created by posthumous conception," Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in Wednesday's unanimous decision, which will affect cases in California and eight other Western states under the court's jurisdiction.
The case involved 7-year-old Arizona twins who were conceived after their father died of cancer.
The parents, Robert Netting and Rhonda Gillett-Netting, both anthropology professors at the University of Arizona, had tried for several years to have a baby. Gillett-Netting "suffered from fertility problems that caused her to miscarry twice," Fletcher wrote.
Husband's death
In December 1994, Netting was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. After doctors told him that chemotherapy might render him sterile, he deposited his semen at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, where it was frozen and stored.
Netting died two months later, before his wife was able to conceive. Before his death he had "confirmed that he wanted [his wife] to have their child after his death using his frozen sperm," the judges noted. Consequently, the ruling avoided some of the issues that have come up in other cases in which women have become pregnant using sperm taken from a man shortly after his death.
About 10 months after Netting's death, his widow became pregnant using in vitro fertilization. Two weeks after the twins, Piers and Juliet, were born in August 1996, Gillett-Netting filed an application for Social Security child's insurance benefits.
The Social Security Administration denied the claim, ruling that the children could not be considered dependents of their father because their father was dead before they were conceived. When Gillett-Netting sued, a federal district judge in Tucson agreed with the Social Security Administration.