Over the past three years there has been a flurry of legislation in Australia to provide answers for some of the legal questions and issues emanating from the new birth technologies. The chief of these is in vitro fertilization: the formation, in the laboratory, of a human zygote. The final result is, sometimes, a live birth. The test-tube baby process, as it is usually described in the media, has developed to include not only fertilization of a wife's ova with her husband's sperm but also the employment of donated gametes; cryopreservation of ova, sperm, and embryos; and, in terms of the possible, the employment of women to bear, deliver, and surrender a baby developed from a couple's laboratory embryo.

The publicity given to the new birth technologies, and the concern (and sometimes consternation) they have aroused, has been accompanied by renewed examinations of those older responses to infertility: AID (artificial insemination by donor) and surrogate mother arrangements effected either by the euphemistically and misleadingly labeled NID (natural insemination by donor) or by artificial insemination.