Her pregnant wife filed for divorce. The lawsuit changed who gets to be a parent in Pa.

PHILADELPHIA -- Nicole Junior and Chanel Glover were ready to be mothers, so the same month as their wedding, they began pursuing IVF.

The two decided early on that Glover would be the one to become pregnant. Junior didn’t care about having a genetic connection — either way, she figured, the baby would be theirs. Still, she was unexpectedly thrilled when she and her wife were able to find a sperm donor who shared some of her features.

“We felt like we would be able to see my face in our child,” Junior, now 43, said. She and the donor both traced their ancestry to Benin and he was even a Sagittarius, like her.

The ensuing fertility tests, medications, and procedures cost upward of $30,000, and the couple split the bills down the middle. Once Glover became pregnant, they chose a name and began planning a baby shower.

Then their marriage fell apart.

Their painstaking efforts to conceive a child, detailed later in hundreds of pages of court documents, ultimately resulted in a healthy baby boy. But it has also resulted in a pitched battle between the two women with repercussions beyond their family, impacting the growing number of people in Pennsylvania who conceive using assisted reproductive technology. That encompasses everything from in vitro fertilization to donor eggs to surrogacy.

Courts will now take into account all the decisions and actions leading up to a successful birth, said Helen Casale, a fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who filed an amicus brief in Glover v. Junior.

“How did they come to this determination to plan this family together? Did they go to doctors appointments? Did they make decisions related to the type of person who’s going to be the sperm donor?” Casale said.

At the root, Junior and Glover were effectively fighting over a basic question, and in doing so changed how the law answers it: In Pennsylvania, in modern times, what makes a parent?

A test case

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