The IVF Cases That Broke Birthright Citizenship
Ethan and Aiden Dvash-Banks are twin brothers—born just four minutes apart on the same September day in the same hospital room in Ontario, Canada. But shortly after their birth in 2016, the U.S. State Department decided that the two boys were very different in the eyes of American law: Aiden was a U.S. citizen but Ethan, the brother with whom he’d shared a womb, was not.
The reasoning, as it were, came down to how the boys had been conceived, via technology that a half-century-old immigration law could have in no way anticipated. The boys’ fathers, Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks, used eggs from an anonymous donor, a gestational surrogate, and their own sperm. Aiden was genetically related to Andrew and Ethan to Elad, but each considered himself a father, in equal measure, to both boys. American officials didn’t see it that way, though: What mattered to them was that Andrew is an American citizen,
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