At the same time as some gays and lesbians were fighting for domestic partnership recognition, others were demanding the right to create families through foster care and adoption. In the 1980s, social workers who were struggling to find homes for foster children increasingly turned to same-sex couples. Those placements proved controversial, leading several states to institute bans on gay and lesbian foster parenting. But the debates they generated helped to make queer families increasingly visible. Adoption out of foster care was only one way in which same-sex couples had children. In the 1980s, lesbian couples increasingly began forming families through donor insemination. To create a legal relationship between the nonbiological mother and the child, the couples petitioned courts to grant second-parent adoptions, analogizing their situations to stepparent adoptions. Over the course of the 1990s, courts increasingly authorized these types of adoptions, which helped entrench queer families in American life.

Chapter 1 argues that parenthood aspirations, including those reliant on novel reproductive techniques, have started to evolve into justiciable rights. It challenges the view that human rights law cannot adequately address bioethical issues and examines commonalities and mutual influences between human rights and bioethical discourse. The chapter first analyses international case law establishing (predominantly negative) obligations in relation to natural procreative capacity. As regards medically assisted procreation, it observes that, perhaps counter-intuitively, most of the claims raised in Strasbourg litigation have been assessed by the European Court of Human Rights as involving active interferences as opposed to lacunae. The chapter provides a catalogue of (alleged) negative and positive obligations as they emerge from the case law; it examines the rationale for the Court’s treatment of a claim through the lens of negative or positive obligations while suggesting that that classification does not have a significant practical impact on the outcome of the case.

This chapter considers the child’s right to identity. It is for good reason that the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that core aspects of a child’s legal identity are in place soon after birth. A legal identity secures the child’s place in society, nation and family, providing the foundations for the child’s sense of self and relationships with others. The fact that these crucial aspects of identity are put in place when the child is an infant means that particular care must be taken to ensure that the child’s interests are not lost; not least because adults often have powerful interests in the way in which a child’s identity is determined and recorded. This chapter considers the formation of a child’s legal identity through recognition of parenthood and the challenges posed by changing reproductive technology and social norms such as the growth of international surrogacy arrangements. Further, a child’s knowledge of their genetic origins and the circumstances of their birth may be important to their sense of self and personal identity. The extent to which the right to identity incorporates a right to knowledge of origins is also considered.

Today’s parents are subject to strict rules about how to raise their children. Some rules focus on parents’ emotions: Parents are bound by emotional display rules, according to which “ideal parents” should be “emotionally perfect” – showing positive emotions and refraining from negative ones while interacting with their children. This chapter introduces Lin and colleagues’ pioneering efforts in borrowing the emotional labor framework to shed light on the consequences for parents of their subjection to these emotional display rules. The emotional labor framework, initially proposed by sociologists, holds that employees must consciously align their feelings with emotional display rules when interacting with customers. This framework provides insight into the mechanisms underlying the relation between emotional labor performed by employees and their well-being. This chapter presents the application of the emotional labor framework to the parenting context and outlines future research directions that this approach opens. We believe that extending the emotional labor framework to the context of parenting opens a promising research avenue in the parenting field.

This chapter examines how early relationships become established relationships. It reviews varying relationship trajectories (e.g., ascent, peak, and descent) and then describes the three key components of the relationship that develop over time: love, intimacy, and commitment. First, the chapter defines and differentiates the various forms of love (e.g., passionate love, companionate love, compassionate love) and reviews how love develops and changes over time. Second, this chapter explores how interpersonal intimacy develops through repeated instances of self-disclosure and perceived partner responsiveness and how developing intimate relationships change the self. Third, this chapter reviews how people make and communicate their commitment decisions, as well as how social network members shape commitment. Finally, it provides an overview of common major transitions (cohabitation, marriage, parenthood) and some key challenges therein.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between Giovanni Amendola and Nelia Pavlova, born 1895. This complex love story has been all but entirely ignored by Italian scholarship on Giovanni and in the national memory. Apparently, the couple had a son who died of meningitis at the age of six in 1929. In Giovanni’s papers there is evidence of the love affair but no acknowledgement of the child. Since Nelia also claims on occasion to have been ‘married’ to Giovanni, some doubt must remain about the veracity of her account. She was a young woman who resembled Eva Kühn in quite a few ways: foreign, multilingual, independent, from her country’s leading political classes, intellectually able. Nelia was one the three people at Giovanni’s deathbed in Cannes (Giorgio was another). Over time, however, the Amendolas, as they put it, ‘lost contact’ with her. Yet she made for herself a distinguished career as a Paris journalist, an expert in Eastern Europe. While the Amendola sons became communists, she remained a liberal democrat, as well as a woman who always remembered Giovanni as her man. Her death probably occurred in 1940. She should not have been forgotten as easily as she has been.

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.

In paediatric nursing, families are central to the care of children – in fact, the patient is considered to be both the child and their whole family. In this chapter, you will begin to explore current approaches to the care of the woman and family during pregnancy, birth and parenting.

Becoming a parent is a life-changing transition for women and their partners, resulting in a range of changes during pregnancy and after birth that can present challenges to parents, and impact their babies. In addition to the profound physical changes that take place during pregnancy, women and their partners experience changes in their roles and relationships with each other as well as others in their social networks. In this chapter, preconception health, and antenatal and postnatal care will be discussed, including considering factors that influence maternal and infant health and wellbeing.