Family-Making: Contemporary Ethical Challenges ed. by Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod (review)

As a recently tenured academic in my mid-thirties, I have been asking myself several interrelated questions on a fairly continuous loop: Do I want kids, and what is the value of having them? If I do want kids, should I bear them, or should I adopt them? And if I do want to bear them, but it turns out that I can’t at this stage of my life, should I employ assisted reproductive technologies? As a professional philosopher interested in questions at the intersection of political philosophy, bioethics, and feminist philosophy, a slightly different set of interrelated questions plays on my mind: What sorts of institutions, laws, and policies are necessitated by the obligations citizens owe with respect to meeting one another’s basic needs? Which of these will best advance the equality interests of women? And which health services—including reproductive services—should individuals have access to on the basis of equality and not ability to pay?

Anyone grappling with such questions must immediately welcome this impressively comprehensive collection of essays, artfully edited by Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod. Indeed, anyone who shares at least one of these interests, personally or professionally, will appreciate the volume’s breadth of insight. The editors set out to canvas the moral terrain of nontraditional family making, or family making through adoption and/or assisted reproductive technology (ART). And they have brought together papers that shed important light on the various contemporary ethical challenges that couples and individuals face depending on the manner in which they choose to welcome children into their lives. Of equal interest to Baylis and McLeod are questions regarding the duties of parents as well the duties of the state with respect to families formed via ART and adoption. Discussions as to the unique values and duties associated with families forged by these means are counterbalanced with papers on the permissibility (or necessity) of regulative state policies on everything from parental licensing, to anonymous gamete donation, to contract pregnancy.

The volume’s title is one of the few things I will query about it, because the presence of a new baby or infant does not a family make. My husband and I are deeply embedded in a wonderful network of parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, and very close friends. Our choice about whether to have kids is not a choice about whether to make a family but whether to invite someone else into our family, and whether to issue this invitation genetically to a not yet existing person or to a young stranger in need of the type of family network we already have to offer. Nonetheless, the authors inform us in their introduction that the title was chosen to signify that, while typical ethical analysis of ART focuses on the rights of people to use/access reproductive technologies, it is equally important to assess what it means to become a parent in this way and to execute the unique obligations thereby incurred. While this latter type of assessment is par for the course in adoption analysis, argue Baylis and McLeod, it should inform the kinds of ethical considerations appropriate to family building via adoption and ART alike. On this they are certainly correct.

Although the volume is organized into six distinct parts, its Archimedean points seem to be threefold. The first (which correlates with part 1) seeks to establish the value of family building for both parent and child. It begins with a paper by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, who argue that the type of value to be found in parenting (via procreation or adoption) cannot be accessed in other kinds of intimate relationships, and that this type of value is intimately related to human flourishing. Certainly, opening the volume with a paper on the unique moral importance of family making, as such, was a reasonable thing to do. And yet the volume could have foresworn the perfectionist tenor of this approach and rested on...