TV Personality, Sheri Shepherd, Ordered To Pay Child Support for Son Born Via Surrogacy

Hollywood actress and television personality, Sherri Shepherd, is considered legally responsible for a child born to a surrogate she and her ex-husband hired before they divorced, Yahoo Parenting reports. Although Shepherd had tried to have the surrogacy contract voided, a Pennsylvania appeals court ruled this week, upholding the contract. The court ruling said,

“(Shepherd) does not dispute that she freely entered into the gestational carrier contract. Baby S. would not have been born but for (her) actions and express agreement to be the child’s legal mother.”

According to Tiffany Palmer, a lawyer for Shepherd’s writer and substitute teacher ex-husband, Lamar Sally, the ruling means she must continue paying $4,100 a month in child support, Sally who is said to be raising the 1-year-old boy in Los Angeles claims that,

“She doesn’t want to be part of his life. It’s all good. I’m going to be parent enough for the both of us.”

Shepherd reportedly paid more than $100,000 while Sally contributed $5,000 for the suburban Philadelphia surrogate who carried the child which had been conceived through a procedure that had used Sally’s sperm and a donor egg.

The couple, who were then in New Jersey, had attended the surrogate’s medical appointments until she was in her second trimester; as Shepherd’s marriage to Sally began to crumble around this time, she put a stop to attending appointments with Sally and the surrogate. The initial birth certificate had listed the surrogate as the mother, prompting California authorities to seek support from her when Sally settled there.

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The owner of the surrogacy agency which the now estranged couple used, are quite happy with the ruling which now makes Shepherd the legal mother listed on the birth certificate. Melissa B. Brisman, owner of the Reproductive Possibilities LLC in Montvale, New Jersey says,

“Surrogates don’t want to feel that someone could want a baby and then just back out. The surrogate is not the mother. It’s a tremendous relief to many people.”

This ruling upheld an earlier decision from Montgomery County where the boy was born in August 2014.