Offspring in the 21st century

• A Boston man sues a fertility clinic for $3 million because he claims his estranged wife became pregnant through in-vitro fertilization without his consent.

• A San Francisco couple refuses to take custody of twins carried for them by a surrogate mother because the couple wanted only one baby.

• Members of the Havasupai Tribe file suit against Arizona State University claiming they were led to believe they were taking part in a medical test for predisposition for diabetes, but tribe members allege they also were being tested for such things as schizophrenia and inbreeding.

Such is the brave new litigation of the brave new world of reproductive and genetic rights.

Judges, often working with conflicting rulings written in a language best described as foreign, are feeling their way along a bewildering terrain of technological advances. Their interpretations are forming a whole new catalog of parental rights. There are huge financial stakes and, very often, enormous heartbreak.

To say the law hasn't kept pace with multitude of advances in modern medicine — "test tube babies," gene therapy, possible cloning and genetic testing — is putting it mildly, say two Utah judges heavily involved in helping their counterparts around the country build a legal framework around our rights to individuality and reproduction.

"For those of us who have done family law, we know how terrible people can be to each other and their children," said Christine Durham, chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court and one of the co-chairwomen of the Genome Justice Program for the the National Association of Women Judges. She is working locally with 3rd District Judge Denise Lindberg.

The project's goal is to inform state and federal judges about the scientific advances and legal dilemmas that will be cropping up with greater regularity on court calendars.

"This is not an attempt to turn judges into geneticists," Durham said. "It's an effort to make them familiar with the vocabulary, not intimidated, and open to thinking hard about policy implications so they don't have to do all of that the first time in a pending case."

Durham co-chaired the Western States Conference on Courts and the Challenge of Genetic Testing in 1998 held at Snowbird. She said she and others sense judges are "very hungry" for this kind of information.

Lindberg also is interested in these topics and recently attended a "Genome Justice" seminar in Seattle. Another pilot program to be held in Phoenix is scheduled for April.