One thread of abortion criticism, arguing that gender equality requires that men be allowed to terminate legal parental status and obligations, has reinforced the stereotype of men as uninterested in fatherhood. As courts facing disputes over stored pre-embryos weigh the equities of allowing implantation of the pre-embryos, this same gender stereotype has been increasingly incorporated into a legal balancing test, leading to troubling implications for ART and family law.
When asked to identify the legal parents of a child, traditional family law principles look backwards in time, primarily to biology and to marriage. People using assisted reproductive technologies such as surrogacy, however, seek to manifest their intent to become parents with a forwardlooking temporal perspective, before a child is conceived and born. This mismatch leaves a parentage void for children of assisted reproductive technologies that should be filled through the use of prebirth parentage orders recognizing intended parents as legal parents-to-be. Intent will not only ameliorate specific problems for such children, but also deepen normative values of parenting such as planning for parenthood, and minimize irrelevant characteristics such as gender.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.