Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, a nd Same-Sex and Unwed Parents' RIghts - Softcover

Shanley, Mary L.

4.42

12 ratings by Goodreads

9780807044094: Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, a nd Same-Sex and Unwed Parents' RIghts

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807044091 ISBN 13: 9780807044094

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2002

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Thanks to new reproductive technologies and new ways of forming families, the world of parenting is opening up as never before. What defines a legal family? Should there be any restrictions on buying and selling eggs and sperm, or hiring "surrogate mothers"? How many parents can a child have?

While there's no going back to the traditional family, Mary Lyndon Shanley shows us that we don't have to live in moral chaos. She offers a new vision of family law that puts each child's right to be cared for at its center, while also taking into account the complex needs of every family member.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Mary Lyndon Shanley is professor of political science at Vassar College. She is author of Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England and coeditor of Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory and Reconstructing Political Theory.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this impressive study of family law's uneasiness with custody rights, Shanley (Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England) explores how dominant notions of family (in which the primary partners are married, heterosexual and of the same race) have contributed to legal rulings on adoption and surrogacy. Shanley critiques our collective fantasy of adopted children as "free standing individuals with no relevant links to either their birth parents or the racial, ethnic, or religious groups [of] their birth parents," arguing that the common practice of joining children and parents who could be biologically related in effect "ratif[ies] a family based on biological ties as the desirable norm." More realistic, she argues, is to conceptualize "family" as something more fluid and complex: "a child may have more than two `parents': genetic parents (sperm and egg donors), biological parents, stepparents, adoptive parents." This inclusive perception allows adoptees "to construct a coherent story of origin" and also lets birth parents experience their full range of feelings for their offspring. Shanley's discussion of transracial adoptions and the controversial role of race in shaping custody rights is evenhanded and riveting, as is her critique of surrogacy-for-pay and the sale of genetic material. Readers may be surprised to find that the U.S. is the only Western country that doesn't restrict human ova sales, and that France doesn't pay sperm donors. This critically sophisticated yet readily accessible discussion of adoption, reproductive technology and parental responsibility represents a much-needed addition to the growing number of books on new forms of family in the 21st century.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.