Sarah Franklin[255] provides a feminist anthropological analysis of the parliamentary debates on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill,[256] highlighting the authority of legal discourse in this respect. Franklin[257] discusses the social construc­tion of ‘natural’ facts in the context of kinship and legal parenthood. She argues: The order of nature provides the basis or foundation for […]

Traditionally, fathers were ‘matched’ with children through their marital relation­ship with the mother, being named as the father upon registration of the child’s birth, and the concurrent assumption of a bio-genetic tie to the child. Some feminist legal commentators suggested that donor insemination was considered problem­atic, as the notion of the ‘child of the marriage’ […]

Anglo-Welsh law requires parents to register their child’s birth within 42 days.[232] Where the child’s parents are unmarried, the onus lies solely on the mother.[233] However, as Bainham[234] has noted, there is no requirement that the mother register the father’s name. The current statutory provisions relating to the circumstances which permit unmarried fathers’ registration are […]

Caroline Jones The difference with donor insemination is you will never be the same again. . . You will never ever be back in the mainstream in totality, and it changes everything forever. Whereas IVF is a temporary deviation down the route to creating your own family and carrying off into the sunset.[221] Introduction Claire’s […]

In sum, acknowledging that the normal features that we associate with being a parent might be distributed among a number of individuals poses two important questions for the law. First, how should we choose which of the various possible ‘parents’ should also acquire the right and duty to care for and support the child? And […]

By restricting the number of parents a child may have to one mother and one father, the law is unable adequately to accommodate increasingly complex repro­ductive arrangements. Children born following surrogacy arrangements, or chil­dren who have been adopted, have two mothers. When donated gametes are used, the genetic parent and the social parent are different […]

In English law, while motherhood may subsequently be transferred by adoption or the s 30 procedure, ab initio a child’s legal mother will always be the woman who gave birth to her. Although now also given statutory effect,[205] this common-law rule derives from the maxim mater est quam gestatio demonstrat (by gestation, the mother is […]

At common law, the husband of a married woman is presumed to be the genetic father of any child that she bears (pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant), and is therefore automatically treated as the child’s legal father from birth. This pre­sumption was, however, always rebuttable by proof that the mother’s husband could not be the […]

There are a number of ways in which we might identify a child’s parents. For mothers, these are currently: (1) giving birth; (2) contributing the egg; and (3) intending to raise the child. For fathers, they are: (1) contributing the sperm; (2) intending to raise the child; (3) being married to the child’s mother; and […]

Emily Jackson Introduction Because parents possess a bundle of important rights and duties, clear and unambiguous legal definitions of motherhood and fatherhood are self-evidently desirable. And yet the law has tended to assume that the existence of a parent — child link will simply be obvious. Whilst this may be true in the paradigm case […]