This concluding chapter draws together themes from across the book and assesses the current health of children’s rights. It opens by considering the extent to which parents’ interests hamper the law’s development of children’s rights. It proceeds to assess the fragmented manner in which children are constructed by law and policy to fulfil adult perceptions of their needs. The difficulties posed by society’s negative attitudes towards young people and their exclusion from the political process are also examined. The chapter concludes by arguing that these problems should be addressed by adopting a more vigorous rights-based perspective and assessing the risks that the current climate of rights scepticism pose for the future of children’s rights.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the common methodologies, starting assumptions, and key aims that shape philosophical work in this sphere. This part of the chapter aims to lay bare the bones of philosophy of parenthood as this field currently stands, providing a critical tool for investigation of existing theories of parenthood, but also further demonstrating the complex interdependence between moral parenthood and the concepts of parenthood covered in the previous chapters. I then give an overview of the approaches philosophers have taken to defining the grounds of moral parenthood, and the different problem cases motivating these accounts. Whilst all these problem cases deviate from the ‘paradigm’ case – in which biological, social, legal, and moral parenthood neatly coincide – literature on parental obligations tends to focus on situations in which candidate parents are disinclined to take on some form of parenting role. Philosophers focusing on parental rights, on the other hand, have often been concerned with an overabundance of candidate parents and have aimed to provide solutions to potential disputes. These disputes might arise between parties to surrogacy agreements, biological parents and step- or adoptive parents; and, more speculatively, between biological parents and the hypothetical ‘best available parents’.

In the final chapter of the book, I argue that future research in philosophy of parenthood should take either a significantly broader or significantly narrower view of parenthood (or parental rights/obligations). We should not assume that we can use any of these four key concepts of parenthood independently, without taking into account their interrelations with others. We may therefore move forward either by considering problem cases in light of these concepts as an interrelated web (or ‘family’) or by stripping back the questions being asked to investigate more specific concepts. For example, the latter approach to moral parenthood might involve putting aside the widespread presupposition that parental rights and obligations are a concomitant ‘package’ and instead focusing on isolated issues, such as the right not to be separated from one’s biological offspring. The rights and obligations with which philosophers are chiefly concerned should, on this approach, be stripped away from the myth of ‘the parent’ as one straightforward entity with clear and consistent characteristics.

This book delves into the four concepts of parenthood – social, biological, legal, and moral – at play in our understandings of parental rights and obligations, reproductive ethics, governance of parenthood, and ontologies of kinship. Our view of what it means to be a parent in any given context is shaped by all of these concepts, which are themselves subject to the influence of changing expectations, as new technologies are produced, cultural views of the family are transformed, and laws shift in response. These changes give rise to questions: who has the right to raise a child? What do we owe our children? Who should the law recognise as a parent, and what is the meaning of that recognition? Many of these questions are not questions about some independent notion of ‘parenthood’ but about the relationships between different concepts of parenthood. In doing so, I highlight newer but no less important questions for philosophical attention, including the scope of rights to become a biological parent (or to avoid that state), the impact of gendered norms on the social role of ‘parent’, and the legal difference between having a child and acquiring one.

This book delves into the four concepts of parenthood – social, biological, legal, and moral – at play in our understandings of parental rights and obligations, reproductive ethics, governance of parenthood, and ontologies of kinship. Our view of what it means to be a parent in any given context is shaped by all of these concepts, which are themselves subject to the influence of changing expectations, as new technologies are produced, cultural views of the family are transformed, and laws shift in response. These changes give rise to questions: who has the right to raise a child? What do we owe our children? Who should the law recognise as a parent, and what is the meaning of that recognition? Many of these questions are not questions about some independent notion of ‘parenthood’ but about the relationships between different concepts of parenthood. In doing so, I highlight newer but no less important questions for philosophical attention, including the scope of rights to become a biological parent (or to avoid that state), the impact of gendered norms on the social role of ‘parent’, and the legal difference between having a child and acquiring one.

This chapter investigates the common presuppositions we make about legal parenthood – for example, the assumption that biological parents are legal parents by default in most jurisdictions. Looking back at some of the ways in which legal rules of parenthood have shifted in recent history, I show that these rules are often more tightly knit with legal structures surrounding marriage and other kinship structures, than with biological parenthood, particularly for men. I examine the problems faced by unmarried fathers who either do not know they have biological offspring or discover this too late to claim legal parental rights. I also discuss the role of the principle of ‘the best interests of the child’ and the conflicts that arise when laws motivated by the best interests of children are broken for the sake of the best interests of a specific child. I then focus on the regulation of adoption and surrogacy in order to illustrate the fragility of distinctions between these practices, in which the difference between parenthood and a criminal offence sometimes hinges on a couple of pieces of paperwork.

Argued April 16, 2013.Decided June 25, 2013.

Justices Matthew L. M. FLETCHER and Kathryn E. FORT delivered the opinion of the Court.*

This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, like her father, grandparents, and a multitude of generations before her. American Indian tribal citizenship with a federally recognized tribe is a unique concept in American law. See, e.g., Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49, 55 (1978) (“[Indian tribes] have power to make their own substantive law in internal matters… .”). Tribal citizens are beneficiaries of the federal government’s trust relationship with Indian tribes, and the federal government has promised to tribal citizens for centuries to assist in the maintenance of tribal governments, cultures, and sovereignty.

In modern times, the familial–political analogy broke down with the emergence and ascendance of liberalism. The collapse of that traditional analogy, it is contended, dissociated the two realms and required new argumentations, definitions, and justifications for the relationships and structure inside each. With the collapse of the analogy, it is argued, the traditional political meaning of the family changed and its standing as a social institution became eroded. Consequently, the political meaning of the family and its relation to justifications for the state and its authority became a fundamental challenge for modern liberal societies. The focus in this chapter is the endeavors of John Locke to define anew parental authority and political authority as unparallel phenomena