What Is Egg Donation Law in Snohomish County?

Egg donation builds families, and it builds legal questions at the same time: who is the mother, what does the donor owe or keep, and what paper does everyone need before anyone goes near a clinic? The Law Office of Chad Foster helps Snohomish County clients with child custody, support, and parentage matters.

Egg donation in Snohomish County is governed by Washington's Uniform Parentage Act, chapter 26.26A RCW, and the framework is unusually clear. A donor is not a parent of a child conceived by assisted reproduction, full stop, under RCW 26.26A.605. The people who are parents are the intended parents: under RCW 26.26A.610, an individual who consents to assisted reproduction with the intent to be a parent of the resulting child is a parent, biology or no biology. Around that statutory core, egg donation runs on agreements, clinic consents, and, for some families, confirmatory court steps. Here is how the pieces fit.

The Two Rules That Decide Parentage

Washington rewrote its parentage act effective 2019, adopting the modern Uniform Parentage Act, and assisted reproduction sits at its center. For related guidance, see What Is Egg Donation Law in Washington.

Rule one: donors are not parents. RCW 26.26A.605 states it in a single sentence, a donor is not a parent of a child conceived by assisted reproduction. A woman who donates eggs, anonymously through a clinic or as a known donor to friends or family, has no parental rights and no parental obligations to the resulting child. No support duty, no residential time, no inheritance link. The rule protects everyone: donors from obligations they never intended, and intended parents from claims to the child they are raising. For related guidance, see What Are the Legal Requirements for Sperm Donation.

Rule two: intent plus consent makes parents. Under RCW 26.26A.610, an individual who consents to assisted reproduction by a woman with the intent to be a parent of the child is a parent of the child. Under RCW 26.26A.615, that consent belongs in a record signed by the woman giving birth and the intended parent; a court can find consent without one only in narrow circumstances, so the statutes work best when the record is unambiguous. The intended mother who carries an egg-donation pregnancy is a parent for a simpler reason: under RCW 26.26A.100, giving birth establishes parentage, genetics or no genetics, outside of surrogacy. The consent rule is how the non-carrying spouse or partner in any assisted reproduction arrangement is a legal parent from birth: not by adoption, not by stepparent status, but as an original parent under the parentage act. Married couples get a second layer, since a child born to a marriage is presumptively the spouses' child, but the assisted reproduction provisions do the precise work, and they cover unmarried intended parents too.

Egg donation should be distinguished from surrogacy, where the woman who carries the pregnancy is not an intended parent; Washington regulates surrogacy separately and thoroughly in the same chapter, with agreement requirements, independent counsel, and court-issued parentage orders. Families whose plans involve both an egg donor and a gestational carrier run both frameworks at once, and that is squarely lawyer territory.

The Egg Donation Agreement

The statute answers who is and is not a parent; the donation agreement answers everything else, and no donor or intended parent should proceed on clinic forms alone, especially in known-donor arrangements. A well-drafted agreement documents that the donation is a donation, aligning with the statute's donor rule, and then handles the human details: compensation and expense reimbursement; how many cycles and what happens to unused eggs or resulting embryos, including on divorce, death, or disagreement; confidentiality and whether the arrangement is anonymous, semi-open, or fully known; future contact between donor and child, if any, and on what terms; medical information sharing, including updates about later-discovered genetic conditions; and each party's independent legal representation.

Known-donor arrangements deserve special care precisely because everyone starts as friends. The aunt-like family friend who donates eggs to a couple may have warm, informal expectations about involvement in the child's life; the intended parents may expect a beloved honorary relative with no standing whatsoever. Both visions are lawful, but only one can be the deal, and the time to write it down is before retrieval, not at the child's fifth birthday party. A written agreement will not transform a donor into a parent, the statute forecloses that, but it prevents the disputes that grow in ambiguity, and it evidences everyone's intent if a question ever reaches a courtroom.

Securing the Family on Paper

For most Snohomish County families using egg donation, parentage is settled by the statutes from birth, and the birth certificate lists the intended parents. Even so, families are often advised to add a belt to the suspenders: a court order confirming parentage, or a confirmatory adoption for a non-genetic parent, converts statutory parentage into a judgment entitled to recognition in every state and most countries, valuable insurance for families who travel or may move somewhere with less accommodating law. The same logic, explained in the context of same-sex couples adopting in Washington, applies to any family whose parentage rests on assisted reproduction statutes rather than genetics.

The arrival of a donor-conceived child is also the moment to update the wider legal architecture: wills naming guardians, beneficiary designations, and health care documents, so the family's plan matches its shape. And families weighing egg donation against other paths to parenthood can compare the routes in what are the types of adoption available in Snohomish County.

Questions Donors and Intended Parents Ask

Can a known donor ever become a parent? Not by donating. The statutory rule holds regardless of the relationship, and a donor who later wants parental status has no path except the intended parents' agreement to something like adoption. The reverse risk is likelier: an arrangement so informal, conception without clinic involvement and without documentation, that a court is later asked whether it was assisted reproduction with a donor at all, or something else. Paper and process prevent that ambiguity.

What about anonymous donation and the child's future questions? Anonymity is contractual and increasingly porous in the era of consumer DNA testing, so agreements now commonly address medical updates and the possibility of future contact directly, deciding it on purpose rather than by surprise.

Does the donor owe or receive anything at tax or insurance time? Compensation and expenses are contract terms with tax consequences worth reviewing with an accountant; nothing in parentage law turns on them.

Build It Before You Need It

Egg donation law rewards families who paper the arrangement early: the statutory rules are friendly, the agreements are manageable, and the disputes that do arise almost always trace to something nobody wrote down. The Law Office of Chad Foster advises intended parents and donors across Snohomish County on donation agreements, parentage confirmation, and the estate planning that follows a new arrival. Call 425.785.8679 before the clinic calendar starts driving the legal one.