Andrew Bainham, Shelley Day Sclater and Martin Richards (eds.), What is a Parent? A Socio Legal Analysis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Which Ties Bind-Redefining the Parent-Child Relationship in an Age of Genetic Certainty
Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J., 2002
To prosper, children need, at a minimum, the ability to draw on adult material resourcesfood, clothing, shelter, love, care, education, and guidance. Children must develop, in addition, a social identity, a sense of self that connects them to the society around them. With the changing conceptions of the family, We must face the issue of how society ensures children's well-being, and whether we should continue to police family structure or become more willing to focus attention on children's individual needs. In addressing these topics in this paper, we therefore start with two overriding questions: (1) Are children's rights best protected by the assertion of individual claims or by the design of a regime that can be expected to advance their interests?; and (2) to what degree should children's claims on adults responsible for their care depend on genetic ties? We plan to begin by staking out a position on the nature of children's rights. We believe that the legal system recognizes these rights not by treating children as autonomous actors but by identifying the individuals and institutions most likely to promote children's interests and encouraging their success. Historically, this principally meant emphasizing the unity of sex, reproduction, and childrearing; in the modem era, .it means redefining parenthood in light of the separation of these activities. In either event, however, it means delineating clear lines of authority for those responsible for children rather than case-by-case decision.-making. Second, we will examine what is known aboutthe relationship between genetics and childcare. This examination will focus on the existing empirical and sociobiological literature that considers the importance ofbiological relationships. While this literature does not produce a definitive set of answers, and while it should not be used to dictate public policy, it suggests that genetic ties play an important role, albeit a role mediated by intimate relationships. We use the empirical literature to critique selected areas of family law as they have interpreted the importance of the genetic link. This examination will focus primarily on paternity, starting with the constitutional status of the marital * Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good, Santa Clara University. I would like to express my appreciation to the Santa Clara University Center for Science, Technology and Society for its research support. ** Professor of Law, George Washington University Law. I would like to express my appreciation to George Washington University for its research support. We would also both like to thank Kathy Baker for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this Article and Mary Dini and Armando Pastran, Jr. fortheir research assistance. We would further like to express heartfelt thanks to Jim Dwyer for organizing such a thoughtprovoking symposium and inviting us to participate. ' The only issues we discuss in this Article, however, are the marital presumption and the similar position of an unmarried man who believes he is the biological father, but is not. Voluntary declarations for unmarried parents present complex issues that will be discussed further in our forthcoming book. '" See, e.g., MICHAEL GROSSBERG, GOVERNING THE HEARTH: LAW AND THE FAMILY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA 201-02 (1985). Grossberg comments that: reformers exposed the problem at the heart of bastardy law: whether the individual or the family was the unit to be protected by the law. Reformers, like most of those who tackled the issue, divided over the question. They struggled to find a way to aid these children without undermining the home as a social institution. Id. at 228.
Ata: Journal of Psychotherapy Aotearoa New Zealand
In May 2000, at the invitation of the Christchurch branch of NZAP, Rosemary Du Plessis contributed a paper exploring the sociological realities of fathering and fatherlessness to a panel discussion entitled 'The Contextual Realitiesof Psychotherapy in the New Millennium'. Members of NZAP working from a variety of theoretical foundations were later invited to respond to the implications of this paper for psychotherapists, their clients and the work of psychotherapy. The paper and members' responses to it follow. In the last decade there has been a considerable amount of writing about 'fatherlessness', 'father hunger' and 'fatherhood'. Fathering activists have argued that issues relating to fathering are challenges that individuals, families, communities, political parties, state bureaucrats and those in the helping professions must confront in 'the new millennium'. This paper examines some recent assertions offered in the United States and ...
Philosophy in Review, 2013
These three books bring a variety of philosophical perspectives to bear on issues of family and intimate association in contemporary western societies. Whatever their different approaches, none of these authors aspires to offer universal, acontextual approaches to these most personal of relationships. Brake and Overall contend that their topics-respectively, the sort of institution that marriage should be in a politically liberal society and the reasons for having children-are 'philosophically undertheorized' (Brake 1). Ramaekers and Suissa maintain, by contrast, that while parenting has much been theorized of late, it has been theorized in the wrong way, and that more helpful and appropriate ways of thinking about the parent-child relationship are urgently needed before these distorting perspectives do yet more damage. Following in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Brake subjects the institution of marriage to careful scrutiny and stern criticism without concluding that it should be abolished. She explores what liberals should make of contemporary marriage and inquires as to what sort of institution, if any, they should defend. Brake recommends a revised version of marriage, in which the state protects the freely chosen and just caring relationships of its adult citizens.
This paper traces the intersecting and diverging paths of adoption norms and the legal recognition of same sex parents. It compares adoption law's trajectory from replicating the modern family and erasing biological connection to its current embrace of biology with a similar movement among lesbian and gay families. While many of these postmodern families are replicating modern family forms, they are also heeding lessons learned in adoption about the endurance of biology, acknowledging and even embracing their children's biological families. The paper first reveals the tenacity of biological connection and its deep and wide significance in United States culture, history, and law. The next section explores lesbian and gay families with children, noting ways these families reflect heteronormativity through two, rather than plural, parent families and yet still value and honor biological connections by including reproductive partners, such as sperm donors and surrogates, into th...
The American Historical Review, 2009
's study of adoption in the modern United States focuses on the rise of "kinship by design": the concerted attempt to reduce or eliminate uncertainty and risk in adoption through public regulation, professional standards, and expert knowledge. Beginning in the early twentieth century, promoters of design-at first philanthropic amateurs, then child welfare reformers and policymakers at the state and federal levels, newly professionalized social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians-claimed that when families were deliberately made the potential for things to go wrong was so high that expert intervention was crucial. To avert the serious social and personal problems that might result from bad adoptions, proponents of kinship by design developed four strategies: regulation, interpretation, standardization, and naturalization. Herman discusses the first two strategies in Part 1, which covers the period 1900-1945, and the last two in Part 2, covering the period 1930-1960. Adoption reformers opposed the forms of child placement (commercial and sentimental) that existed before the twentieth century. When children were placed in families merely out of altruistic or economic motives, the risks were considerable. In the early twentieth century, the main fears were that "normal" and deserving parents might adopt a defective or racially mixed child and that unscrupulous or cruel adults might abuse vulnerable children. To make adoption safe (or at least safer) for all parties involved, reformers endeavored to regulate it and establish minimum standards having to do with the qualities or conditions that made children and parents suitable for adoption, the keeping of records, and the training of staff. Child welfare reformers in this "antiadoption era" (p. 30) nevertheless believed that the child's tie to the birth mother must be maintained at all costs, and thus viewed adoption as an inferior alternative. For social workers influenced by Freudian theories, the psychological investigation and interpretation of the personalities and motivations of every participant in adoption were essential to making adoptive families "real" families. Interpretation was important because people were unaware of their unconscious desires and motivations. Herman shows how interpretation led to a new understanding of the adults involved in adoption. Rather than a feebleminded girl of loose morals, the (white) unmarried birth mother was seen as a neurotic or hysterical woman who unconsciously wished to become pregnant and who would make a terrible mother. Couples who applied to become adoptive parents were subjected to interpretation too, as they did not know their true motivations and needed help dealing with infertility. Whereas in the early twentieth century eugenic fears dictated that infant adoptions were inadvisableto know that a child was normal and completely white, one had to wait-by mid-century, research on attachment and early deprivation as well as the new stress on love and feelings of belonging between parents and children made early placements acceptable and even preferable for adoption professionals (as they had long been for adoptive parents). A central element of kinship by design was the hope to erase or conceal the difference between adoptive and nonadoptive families by making the former resemble "natural" families as much as possible. Herman's discussion of "matching" reveals the various concerns, interests, desires, and prejudices that informed this ideology and the involvement of scientists and practitioners (such as the prominent child expert Arnold Gesell) in the effort to ensure the
SAGE Open
The concept of biological kinship is a sociocultural construction of facts taken for granted as “natural.” The concept of blood, of “bond,” of “connection,” symbolizes the fact that relatives are perceived as having claims on one another by virtue of DNA. It is taken for granted that the biological relation attains a meaning in human relations. Yet, this taken-for-grantedness is rarely deconstructed. Thus, the purpose of this article is threefold: (a) to examine the conceptualization of the links between the social and the biological in societies of the Global North, and to analyze the assumptions that implicitly underpin the literature on new forms of family, in particular, “single” mothers by choice with donor-conceived children. Two of the most prolific scholars on the subject, from the field of psychology in the United Kingdom and from the field of social anthropology in Spain, will be discussed, taking into account a preliminary analysis of 35 ethnographic interviews with “sing...
Nothing if not family? Genetic ties beyond the parent/ child dyad
Bioethics, 2023
Internationally, there is considerable inconsistency in the recognition and regulation of children's genetic connections outside the family. In the context of gamete and embryo donation, challenges for regulation seem endless. In this paper, I review some of the paths that have been taken to manage children' being closely genetically related to people outside their families. I do so against the background of recognising the importance of children's interests as moral status holders. I look at recent qualitative research involving donor-conceived people and borrow their own words to make sense of a purported interest to know (of) their close genetic ties. I also review ways in which gamete donation may have facilitated new kinds of kinship, which are at the same time genetic and chosen. In short, in this paper, I explore what meaning there could be in genetic connections that is not about parenthood. Further, I argue that the focus on parenthood in previous work in this area may be detrimental to appreciating some of the goods that can be derived from close genetic connections.