the context

As you probably have read or heard, many countries have a problem with serious and rampant adoption fraud and baby-selling. What consular officers are worried about is someone trying to get around the long and complex legal procedures for adopting a child overseas. You remember that I mentioned a woman who claimed that she had her first baby at 54 yrs of age. As we all know, it's very hard to conceive "naturally" at 54. We asked if she had ART since that would help explain her situtation. She said no, so we asked for additional proof that it was her baby. She brought in a huge pile of documents from the clinic including ultrasounds, doctor's records, bills from the hospital, etc. When our fraud office phoned the clinic, they had never heard of the patient or the doctor. It was all fraud so that the woman could pass the baby off as her own and get a US passport and be able to come to the US. She may have been smuggling the child on behalf of the parents who were living illegally in the US or she might have been trying to circumvent adoption laws.

Either way, this is just one example of something that happens quite a lot. Consular officers don't just look at older women, they look at all births abroad to make sure that the child is the "biological" child of the parents, since immigration law says that the child must be related by "blood" to the US citizen. In terms of ART, this has been interpreted by the lawyers to mean "genetic" child. One of the easiest ways to establish that is through DNA testing.

It's definitely not designed to target ART parents, just prevent fraud, people smuggling and baby-selling.