The Contract That Decides Who a Child’s Parents Are In North Carolina, surrogacy and reproductive law move faster than the statutes meant to govern them. Gantt Family Law’s Anna Worley has watched that gap from both sides of the bench.

For most families, having a child is a private matter. For a growing number of North Carolina families — those turning to a surrogate, a donor, or an embryo created years earlier and thawed for one more chance at a sibling — it is also a legal one. And in a state where the law has not fully caught up to the science, the difference between a joyful outcome and a courtroom crisis often comes down to a single decision: who drafted the agreement, and how well.

That’s the world Anna Worley has spent her career inside — first from the bench, now from the other side of the table.

Before she was a Board-Certified Family Law Specialist at Gantt Family Law, Anna Worley spent more than 15 years as a Wake County family court judge. It is, in family law circles, a rare credential. Most attorneys learn to argue a case. Judges learn to decide one — which means they’ve watched, from the bench, exactly which arguments hold up under pressure and which fall apart the moment a case gets contentious.

Reproductive law cases are often the most contentious of all, because they sit at the intersection of two things the law struggles to reconcile: contracts, which are supposed to be certain, and parenthood, which rarely is. A surrogacy agreement might be airtight on paper and still collide with a hospital’s practices at birth, a change of heart, or a dispute between intended parents an ocean away from where the child is born. Anna has spent over a decade watching exactly these moments play out in her courtroom — which is precisely why, as an attorney, she now spends so much of her time making sure they don’t happen to her clients in the first place.

“The cases that end up in the news are almost never the ones where someone had good legal guidance from day one,” is the kind of hard-won principle that shapes her practice. “They’re the ones where someone assumed a handshake, a form they found online, or a clinic’s paperwork was enough.”

North Carolina, unlike some states, has no single comprehensive statute governing surrogacy. Instead, the legal footing for surrogacy and donor-conception arrangements is pieced together from contract law, adoption statutes, and a body of case law that continues to evolve. In practice, that means:

• Surrogacy agreements are generally enforceable in North Carolina when they are carefully drafted and executed — but “generally enforceable” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Courts look closely at how the agreement was formed, whether both intended parents and the surrogate had independent legal counsel, and whether it addresses contingencies most people never think to ask about.
• Egg and sperm donation raises its own questions of legal parentage — who is, and is not, a legal parent when a child is conceived with a donor’s genetic material, and how that gets formalized before the child is ever born.
• Establishing parentage after birth — through a pre-birth order, adoption, or other legal mechanism — is often the step that determines whether a family’s legal status is airtight or vulnerable for years to come.

None of this is exotic anymore. Surrogacy and donor conception have moved from rare to increasingly common across North Carolina — which means the number of families relying on an agreement that was never properly vetted is rising right along with it.

Family law rarely stays private when a reproductive arrangement breaks down. Custody disputes between intended parents and a surrogate, contested parentage between former partners, disagreements between known donors and the family raising their genetic child — these cases move slowly, cost enormously, and often end up litigated in open court, sometimes in the press.

Consider a scenario that plays out, in one variation or another, more often than most people realize: a couple works with a surrogate using an agreement they found as a template online, without independent counsel for either side. The pregnancy proceeds without incident. Then, at or after birth, a dispute arises — over parentage, over the terms nobody thought to specify, over what happens if a term of the agreement was never enforceable to begin with. What should have been the happiest day of a family’s life becomes the first day of a legal battle that can stretch on for years, with a child’s future sitting at the center of it.

It is exactly the kind of case that fills headlines and haunts family law attorneys — not because the outcome was unfair, but because it was avoidable.

Anna’s dual perspective — judge and now advocate — gives her something most attorneys in this space simply don’t have: an intimate understanding of what a court will actually scrutinize when a reproductive law agreement is challenged. She doesn’t draft agreements to survive a best-case scenario. She drafts them to survive the worst one.

What that looks like in practice:

• Judicial insight. Fifteen-plus years on the bench means she has seen, firsthand, which contract provisions hold up in court and which quietly unravel under cross-examination.
• Compassion under pressure. Reproductive law cases are rarely just legal disputes — they are among the most emotionally charged matters a family can face. Anna’s approach treats that reality as central, not incidental.
• Specific reproductive law fluency. Beyond general family law, Anna’s practice includes direct experience with the surrogacy and donor-conception matters that most general practitioners rarely encounter.

If there is one message worth taking from the families who have lived through a reproductive law dispute, it is this: the time to consult an experienced attorney is before the agreement is signed, not after it’s contested. A well-drafted surrogacy or donor agreement, reviewed by counsel who understands exactly how a North Carolina court will read it, is the difference between a private, joyful path to parenthood and a public, painful legal fight.

For families in the Triangle area of North Carolina navigating this path, Gantt Family Law — and Anna Worley’s rare vantage point from both sides of the bench — offers exactly the kind of guidance this fast-moving corner of family law demands.

Gantt Family Law serves Central North Carolina.