Family judges are well used to making decisions regulating a
child's upbringing, for example determining where a child
should live and how much time he or she should spend with each
parent, but modern relationships continue to throw up interesting
problems that the court has to grapple with. The Court of Appeal
recently had to deal with such a case involving a 20 month old boy,
Z.
For understandable reasons the judgment of the Court of Appeal
is anonymised and therefore reads rather like 'alphabetti
spaghetti'. Lady Justice Black described the history as
being 'complex'.
The dispute was between two men, A and B, and Z's mother, X
and her partner, P.
A and B were a homosexual couple in a civil partnership. They
were the fathers of twins, who were born in 2013 as a result of a
surrogacy arrangement with V. A and B subsequently fell out with V.
They also wished to have further children using the gametes of the
woman who had donated the eggs for the conception of
