Rethinking Law's framing of the Parent/Child Link

ongoing

Legal parenthood (i.e. the package of legal recognition, rights and obligation that typically attaches to the parent-child nexus) has undergone incremental change in response to scientific developments in assisted reproductive technology (ART) and human rights challenges but has fragmented due to its inadequacy to reflect the complexity of modern family life. The legal rules establishing the parent-child link now encompass different and conflicting regulatory functions at the same time – establishing legal identity, managing adult behaviour, marking family deservingness, and acting as genealogical information. As society has become more diverse, more children’s rights focussed, more tolerant of different family forms, and more internationally mobile, these different and competing regulatory functions can no longer be fulfilled by an anachronistic adult status. ReKINdle provides a new way to think about the legal nexus between parent and child, not as an adult status, but as a two-way legal interdependency between parent and child. Every country in Europe predicates parenthood on maternity by birth with a separate legal regime for children conceived through ART. ReKINdle goes beyond tinkering with legal rules assigning parentage to rethink the entire basis of family law. ReKINdle interrogates the historical, legal and social dimensions of legal parenthood in Ireland, England and Wales, Sweden and Poland to expose the gaps between the regulatory work that the concept of legal parenthood is currently doing and the social expectations that are placed on the concept. This radical approach assesses how legal parenthood works in a holistic fashion, investigating lived experiences of parents and children navigating different life stages. ReKINdle also examines the limits and perspectives surrounding state policing of parental status using prefigurative law to explores new ways of thinking from state perspectives.