Article on Survivor Benefits
When Congress instructed the SocialSecurity Administration to begin paying a social insurance benefit to “widowsand orphans” in the 1930s, it simplified the process of determining anapplicant’s relationship to an insured decedent in two significant ways: First,Congress ordered the agency to honor the intestate laws of each state whendetermining whether an applicant was actually the child of a decedent, andsecond, it ordered the agency to treat any child who could qualify as anintestate heir as if that child actually depended on the parent financially atthe time of the parent’s death. Three-quarters of a century later, advances inreproductive technology make it possible for a child to be born decades afterthe death of one or both of her genetic parents. As the law begins to explorethe rights and responsibilities of the parents who choose postmortemreproduction and the children whose lives come into being through thoseprocedures, the heuristics that facilitated efficiency in the 1930s may yieldunintended consequences. This Note explores some of those consequences andsuggests minor alterations to the rules governing survivor’s-benefitseligibility intended to preserve the program’s social insurance function asreproductive technology transforms life after death from a hope or a fear intoa choice.