Janene Oleaga on Reproductive and Family Rights
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/04/15
Janene Oleaga is a family formation attorney and reproductive rights advocate, specializing in surrogacy, egg donation, sperm donation, embryo donation, adoption, and fertility law. As the founder of Oleaga Law LLC, she assists clients with assisted reproductive arrangements, confirmatory adoption, and LGBTQ+ parenthood rights. Based in New York and Portland, ME. Legal reforms have expanded LGBTI+ access to reproductive healthcare, including fertility treatments and gender-affirming care, with states like Maine, New York, and Massachusetts mandating fertility insurance coverage. Ensuring legal parentage through confirmatory adoption and court judgments protects families. Barriers remain due to state restrictions, societal biases, and opposition from personhood movements. Grassroots storytelling drives legislative change, and the U.S. surrogacy laws attract international couples. Oleaga emphasizes starting advocacy efforts anywhere to build coalitions for change.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How have legal reforms advanced access to reproductive technologies and family-building options for LGBTI+ individuals?
Janene Oleaga: Inclusive legislation allows LGBTI+ individuals to access healthcare including fertility treatments and gender affirming care, and secure their legal relationships to their children. Fertility insurance mandates in states like Maine, New York, and Massachusetts, require insurance providers that meet certain criteria to provide fertility coverage for all members of the insurance plan regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation. While cost is only one factor that impacts access to fertility care, removing the issue of cost allows more LGBTI+ individuals to build their families through assisted reproduction – whether sperm donation, egg donation and surrogacy, or embryo donation.
Additionally, enacting inclusive legislation that provides for individuals to secure their legal parentage to their children born through assisted reproduction has allowed LGBTI+ parents to protect their legal parentage through a formal court process – whether a judgment of parentage, step parent/second parent adoption, or confirmatory adoption. In states that have a legal framework for parents through assisted reproduction to secure their legal rights, LGBTQ+ individuals can protect their legal parentage to their children born through assisted reproduction. In 2025, this is more important than ever.
Whether you had your children through sperm donation, or egg donation and surrogacy, now is the time to ensure your legal parental rights are secured through whatever process is available to you in your state of residence – whether a confirmatory adoption, step parent or second parent adoption, or other judgment of parentage. A final court order declaring your legal parentage is entitled to full faith and credit in every state throughout the United States.
Jacobsen: What are the current barriers to advanced access reproductive healthcare and family formation services for LGBTI+ people?
Oleaga: State borders and societal pressures. Some states are less inclined to make fertility treatment and assisted reproduction laws available to LGBTI+ individuals. In the absence of federal legislation establishing access to fertility care to all, these matters are governed at the state level.
Jacobsen: Why are grassroots community-led solutions complementary to legal reforms?
Oleaga: Because the stories of individuals are the most powerful tool we have to effectuate change. Lawyers and politicians can discuss policy at length, but we need individuals willing to share their stories to humanize the need for further legal reform. Community-led solutions humanizes efforts to improve public policy.
Jacobsen: What strategies have helped overcome institutional resistance?
Oleaga: Sometimes people don’t understand or care about an issue until it directly affects them. Some people don’t care about increasing access to fertility care until someone they love is unable to do so. These stories are the most important tool we have to ensure legislation continues to evolve. I will not stop until we can all access care. All means all.
Jacobsen: How do these legal reforms tie into international efforts for equality for diverse family types?
Oleaga: Legal reforms at the state level throughout the United States have made some states ideal locations for individuals in other countries to access egg donation and gestational surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy is illegal throughout most of Europe, so many LGBTI+ couples come to the United States in order to benefit from the laws of certain states allowing and regulating these processes. Pro-family legislation in the US isn’t only available to Americans, but to the world at large.
Jacobsen: What are the organized (and disorganized, in fact) efforts to restrict reproductive technologies and family formations to a strictly confined type?
Oleaga: The entire personhood movement is a way to restrict reproductive freedom for LGBTI+ individuals and women in general. Personhood legislation goes beyond the restrictions on reproductive care imposed by abortion bans. We cannot have personhood and IVF – the two cannot coexist.
The order directs the White House’s Domestic Policy Council to investigate what’s driving up the cost of IVF and recommend ways to lower it,
Jacobsen: What are the effective methods to build coalitions and mobilize advocacy efforts?
Oleaga: Start. Start anywhere at any time. Start small. Start with your community. Share your story. You’ll find the people you need to effectuate change and you’ll build the right team. Just start.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Janene.
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