Judge delivers stark warning to couples without formal parenting agreements.

This once-loving couple never thought they would end up in court.

They never thought they would be fighting each other for the right to see their own baby.

A UK court has made a ruling over a lesbian couple who had been in a relationship for about 18 months and in it delivered a stark warning to same-sex couples who enter into informal parenting arrangements.

The two women – one from Ireland and one from the UK — used artificial insemination to conceive their baby.

The English woman had used a syringe to inseminate her partner with sperm from a donor they found on the internet.

The Irish woman, who is in her mid-30s, had the baby in mid-October but things began to fall apart in their relationship.

They lived in England together with their newborn baby, with the English woman even breastfeeding her when her natural mother fell ill.

However, the couple split and the birth mother – known in court as ‘C’ — took the baby home to Ireland with her.

The high court heard that the other woman – referred to as ‘L’ – considered herself an “equal parent”.

However, her name did not appear on the infant’s birth certificate.

The judge said the ‘extremely distressed’ English woman, who is in her mid-40s, was fighting for contact with the child, but as she was not the biological parent she had limited legal rights.

He ruled that ‘family life’ did exist between the baby and ‘L’ but concluded that the baby’s ‘removal’ to Ireland was lawful and an English court did not have jurisdiction.

The Daily Mail reports that the judge, Justice Peter Jackson, joined a host of other senior legal figures who have expressed concern over unregulated artificial conception.

The high court judge said the case was ‘one more example of the painful legal confusion’ that arises when couples have children in informal arrangements without considering all the consequences.

He referred to another ruling where Justice Eleanor King described a similar case as “a valuable cautionary tale of the serious legal and practical difficulties that can arise where men or women, desperate for a child of their own, enter into informal arrangements.”

Solicitor Hannah Cornish, a family law expert at Slater and Gordon, told The Daily Mail:

“The couple needed to make an application to the court to protect the parental rights of the woman who was not the biological mother as soon as the child was born. But they just didn’t address it, and unfortunately, when everything is going well, people don’t automatically think about the legal implications. I think these sorts of scenarios are going to increase as the nature of the family changes.”