Publication Date: November 2012
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781780930114
This book examines, through a multi-disciplinary lens, the possibilities offered by relationships and family forms that challenge the nuclear family ideal, and some of the arguments that recommend or disqualify these as legitimate units in our societies.
That children should be conceived naturally, born to and raised by their two young, heterosexual, married to each other, genetic parents; that this relationship between parents is also the ideal relationship between romantic or sexual partners; and that romance and sexual intimacy ought to be at the core of our closest personal relationships - all these elements converge towards the ideal of the nuclear family.
The authors consider a range of relationship and family structures that depart from this ideal: polyamory and polygamy, single and polyparenting, parenting by gay and lesbian couples, as well as families created through current and prospective modes of assisted human reproduction such as surrogate motherhood, donor insemination, and reproductive cloning.
That children should be conceived naturally, born to and raised by their two young, heterosexual, married to each other, genetic parents; that this relationship between parents is also the ideal relationship between romantic or sexual partners; and that romance and sexual intimacy ought to be at the core of our closest personal relationships - all these elements converge towards the ideal of the nuclear family.
The authors consider a range of relationship and family structures that depart from this ideal: polyamory and polygamy, single and polyparenting, parenting by gay and lesbian couples, as well as families created through current and prospective modes of assisted human reproduction such as surrogate motherhood, donor insemination, and reproductive cloning.
Table of Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Role of Sexual Partnership in UK Family Law
- The Two-Parent Limitation in ART Parentage Law
- The Best Interest of Children and the Basis of Family Policy
- Donor-conceived Children Raised by Lesbian Couples
- Donor-Conception as a ‘Dangerous Supplement’ to the Nuclear Family
- Choosing Single Motherhood?
- Surrogacy
- Licensing Parents
- Liberal Feminism and the Ethics of Polygamy
- Distinguishing Polygamy and Polyamory Under the Criminal Law
- Sex and Relationships
- Human Cloning and the Family in the New Millennium
- Moral and Legal Constraints on Human Reproductive Cloning
