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

This fascinating anthology focuses on the question of how we make families, and how bionormative assumptions shape or distort our collective thinking about parenting, children’s welfare, and state obligations to parents and children. The editors are primarily interested in the question of whether parents’ moral responsibilities toward children differ for children produced through assistive reproductive technologies (ART) compared to children brought into the family via adoption. As the editors point out, in the realm of ART, most of the philosophical literature has been focused on parental autonomy and rights to assistance in reproducing, while the adoption literature is almost entirely focused on the protection of children. The anthology does an excellent job of exploring this disconnect, and probing assumptions about moral responsibilities within family-making. Taken as a whole, the chapters explore “whether people should rely on others’ reproductive labour in having children, whether they should ensure that they will have a genetic tie to their children or that their children will have some connection to genetic relatives, whether they should bring a new child into the world at all, whether they should agree to what the government would require of them for an adoption, where they should live if the family they make is multi-racial, at what age they should forgo having children, and the list goes on” (6).

The first section of the book sets the stage with two excellent chapters on the goods of parenting (Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift) and the goods of childhood (Samantha Brennan). The goods of parenting are distinguished from other related goods—intimacy with another adult or friend, friendship with a child, being an uncle, having a pet, etc.—and understood to be extremely valuable and non-substitutable (13). Brighouse and Swift identify at least four things that distinguish parent/child relations from these other intimacies: 1) they cannot have equal [End Page E-5] power, given that children do not enter the relationship voluntarily, are dependent, and cannot exit at will; 2) parents have the power to (indeed are often expected to) coerce children; 3) parents set up the environment that creates a child’s values and possibility for autonomy; and 4) parents receive unconditional intimacy from the child, and presumed trust (15–16). These distinct features of the parenting role lead to unique goods of parenting, and highlight some of the reasons we often consider access to family-making to be a fundamental right. The authors note that parenting is “likely to be one of the most important things one does with one’s life” (19). Like romantic relationships, parenting may not be necessary for a good life, but it is often a very significant component. Importantly, though, the goods of parenting are not necessarily tied to biological parenthood, but are instead gained through the intimate, unique relational role and resultant experiences.

Brennan’s chapter on the goods of childhood takes on the question of how much of children’s welfare (and parental obligations to promote it) is attached to the present child vs. the future adult she will become. A parent’s job isn’t simply to get the child to survive until adulthood, or even to have an “open future,” but also to help her enjoy the unique goods of childhood, including for instance, free play, a sense of time as endless, a sense that all doors are open, and absolute trust in others (43). On Brennan’s view, children aren’t small or deficient adults, but developing relational, autonomous creatures who need help to pursue their own temporal goods.

Part two of the book critiques the ways in which bionormativity (the idea that the “gold standard” of the family is having parents who are genetically related to the child) influences our thinking and policy-making on family creation. The chapter by Charlotte Witt takes on David Velleman’s arguments (2005 (2008) regarding the importance of having “family resemblance” for developing a healthy and adequate identity or sense of self. Velleman considers it to...