This volume explores the ethics of making or expanding families through adoption or technologically assisted reproduction. For many people, these methods are separate and distinct: they can choose either adoption or assisted reproduction. But for others, these options blend together. For example, in some jurisdictions, the path of assisted reproduction for same-sex couples is complicated by the need for the partner who is not genetically related to the resulting child to adopt this child if she wants to become the child's legal parent. The essays in this volume critically examine moral choices to pursue adoption, assisted reproduction, or both, and highlight the social norms that can distort decision-making. Among these norms are those that favour people having biologically related children ('bionormativity') or that privilege a traditional understanding of family as a heterosexual unit with one or more children where both parents are the genetic, biological, legal, and social parents of these children. As a whole, the book looks at how adoption and assisted reproduction are morally distinct from one another, but also emphasizes how the two are morally similar. Choosing one, the other, or both of these approaches to family-making can be complex in some respects, but ought to be simple in others, provided that one's main goal is to become a parent.
Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod: Introduction Families: Of Parents and Children 15 1: Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift: The Goods of Parenting 2: Samantha Brennan: The Goods of Childhood and Children's Rights Bionormativity: Philosophical and Empirical Perspectives 3: Charlotte Witt: A Critique of the Bionormative Concept of the Family 4: Lucy Blake, Martin Richards, and Susan Golombok: The Families of Assisted Reproduction and Adoption Becoming a Parent: Personal Choices 5: Christine Overall: What is the Value of Procreation? 6: Tina Rulli: The Unique Value of Adoption Becoming a Parent: State Interests 7: Jurgen De Wispelaere and Daniel Weinstock: State Regulation and Assisted Reproduction: Balancing the Interests of Parents and Children 8: Carolyn McLeod and Andrew Botterell: 'Not for the Faint of Heart': Assessing the Status Quo on Adoption and Parental Licensing 9: Julie Crawford: On Non-Biological Maternity, or 'My Daughter is Going to be a Father!' Special Responsibilities of Parents 10: James Lindemann Nelson: Special Responsibilities of Parents Using Technologically Assisted Reproduction 11: Mianna Lotz: Adoptee Vulnerability and Post-Adoptive Parental Obligation 12: Heath Fogg Davis: The Political Geography of Whites Adopting Black Children in the United States Contested Practices 13: Kimberly Leighton: Geneticizing the Desire to Know: Analogies to Adoption in Arguments Against Anonymous Gamete Donation 14: Françoise Baylis: Transnational Commercial Contract Pregnancy in India 15: Jennifer A. Parks: Aged Parenting Through ART and Other Means
Françoise Baylis is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy at Dalhousie University, and founder of the NovelTechEthics research team. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Assisted human reproduction, research involving women, public health ethics, relational identity are but a few of the topics on which she works. In addition to her academic research, she contributes to national policy via government research contracts, membership on national committees and public education. This workDLall of which is informed by a strong commitment to the common goodDLfocuses largely on issues of justice and community. Carolyn McLeod is Associate Professor of Philosophy, an Affiliate Member of Women's Studies and Feminist Research, and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. Most of her research deals with moral dilemmas that occur in reproductive health care and with the moral concepts needed to resolve these dilemmas. She has tackled moral dilemmas having to do, for example, with miscarriage, infertility, contract pregnancy, fertility preservation, and conscientious refusals by health care professionals to provide standard services such as abortions. She has also written about--among other concepts--autonomy, trust, integrity, objectification, and conscience.
Reviews for Family-Making: Contemporary Ethical Challenges
`Anyone grappling with such questions must immediately welcome this impressively comprehensive collection of essays, artfully edited by Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod. Indeed, anyone who shares at least one of these interests, personally or professionally, will appreciate the volume's breadth of insight. The editors set out to canvas the moral terrain of nontraditional family making, or family making through adoption and/or assisted reproductive technology (ART). And they have brought together papers that shed important light on the various contemporary ethical challenges that couples and individuals face depending on the manner in which they choose to welcome children into their lives.' Vida Panitch, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics