This article proposes a new model for analyzing legal issues arising from technological conception and uses it to develop rules to govern the. legal parentage of technologically conceived children. Professor Garrison shows that most commentators on technological conception have employed a "top-down" methodology, deriving rules for specific cases from an abstract global principle such as reproductive autonomy, freedom of contract, or anticommodification. Professor Garrison critiques these and several other approaches, showing that they offer little concrete guidance in many cases, risk the introduction of discordant values into the law of parentage, and fail to capture all of the values that have traditionally guided parentage determination. In their place, she proposes an "interpretive methodology" which, by relying heavily on current rules governing parentage determination in other contexts, would assimilate technological conception within the broader law of parental obligation. Professor Garrison argues that cases of sexual and technological conception should be governed by similar rules because, despite mechanical differences between these two reproductive methods, there are no significant differences in the parent-child relationships that they produce. She demonstrates that the interpretive approach can cabin rule-making disagreements, and that it can generate comprehensive parentage rules that are based on uniform policy goals and that ensure consistent treatment of parent-child relationships. * Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. Research for this article was supported by Brooklyn Law School's Faculty Research Fund. I See ANTONIA FRASER, THE WIVES OF HENRY VIII 2 (1992). 2 See Genesis 16:x-4. 3 Infertility affects "approximately ten to fifteen percent of American couples trying to conceive." 2 HARRISON'S PRINCIPLES OF INTERNAL MEDICINE 2029 (i 3 th ed. 1994). Although the overall incidence of infertility in the American population does not appear to have risen in recent years, the number of physician visits for treatment of infertility has increased dramatically.

Some 500,000 American children live in foster homes as wards of the state.' Most of them have spent years 2 in the foster care system. 3 While in foster care, many have lost contact with their natural parents 4 and have suffered frequent shifts from one foster home to another, 5 thus losing the opportunity to form a close and long-lasting relationship with any parental figure. This problem, now generally described as "foster care drift," has drawn widespread attention in "* Associate Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. B.A. 1970, University of Utah; J.D. 1975, Harvard Law School. I wish to thank

Today, there is consensus that the current system of allocating and enforcing child support obligations does not work well for disadvantaged families, most of which are nonmarital. Nonmarital children are less likely to have support orders established than marital children, and they are much less likely to experience full payment. In this article, we report data on child support awards and enforcement associated with a sample of paternity actions brought in 2008 or 2010 in St. Joseph County, Indiana. We found that child support practice in St. Joseph County promotes limited contact between children and their absent fathers, nonpayment of prior support obligations, and the accrual of arrears that can never be paid. These results strongly support recent changes in federal child support regulations and programs that postdate the orders in our study. Our results also demonstrate both the need for additional reforms and the difficulties that lie ahead as the states begin to grapple with applying the new standards.

The article examines this question: How much do parents owe their children? It describes the historical development of the child support obligation and current support "guidelines," mandated by Congress with the hope of raising support levels. It utilizes several distributive justice theories to evaluate the guidelines, concluding that they fail under any approach. The article explains that all of the surveyed distributive justice theories lead to one of two support models. The "Community Model" bases the support obligation on family membership and mandates income sharing as a basic approach. The "Autonomy Model" bases the support obligation on both the societal burden produced by nonsupport and the nonsupporting parent's contractual obligations to the custodial parent; it mandates public assistance (or poverty) prevention and contract enforcement as basic goals. The Article describes the results that the Community and Autonomy models would achieve and evaluates available evidence bearing on the choice of a model, including survey data on public attitudes toward the support obligation, the extent to which each model is consistent with the assumptions implicit in related areas of law, and the ability of each model to meet the policy concerns that motivated the child support initiatives in the first place. It concludes that the Community Model is the better choice. How much do parents owe their children? Does parental obligation derive primarily from the burdens that a child may impose on society and on the other parent, or from parent's and child's joint membership in a sharing community?

No abstract