Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same Sex and Unwed Parents

Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same Sex and Unwed Parents. Mary Lyndon Shanley. Boston: Beacon Press. 2001. 206 pp. ISBN 0-80704408-3. $27.00 (hardback). In the introduction to this timely book, Mary Lyndon Shanley argues that we need new family laws that better reflect the current diversity of family formation and parenting practices. That is to say, traditional family law privileged heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate family and parenting form. Single parents, gay and lesbian parents, adoption, reproductive technologies, divorced and blended families all present challenges to traditional family law. Shanley believes that family law should not be based on patriarchalism, genetic essentialism, or individual liberties but, instead, should "balance the rights of personal choice with concern for relationship and association as crucial elements of individual and social well-being. New law ... should insist that people assume responsibilities of supporting and caring for family members, particularly children" (p. 7). Shanley asserts that in all of these new parenting arrangements the primary relationship between parents and children should be one of stewardship, which means that parental authority must be grounded in the assumption of responsibilities that are not subject to parental will or negotiation alone. In the chapters that follow, Shanley examines the ethical challenges that diverse parenting practices bring to family law. In chapter 1, she examines the controversies around open adoption and transracial adoption and argues that these two practices challenge conventional thinking about the biological family. After reviewing traditional adoption policies, Shanley argues for open adoption, except in rare cases where it poses a grave threat to the biological parents. Shanley believes that adult adoptees have the right to know their personal history. In addition, Shanley attempts to transform the debate around transracial adoption between the individual rights of the child to be adopted and the group rights of the racial-ethnic group by involving the birth mother more in the decision about the placement of the child. Similarly, in chapter 2, Shanley challenges the rights of unwed biological fathers by arguing that the decision to relinquish a child for adoption belongs to biological parents who have actually provided care to a child, not simply to people related to the child biologically. In chapter 3, titled "A Child of Our Own: Against a Market in Sperm and Eggs," Shanley reviews the processes of gamete transfer (sperm or egg donation) and makes two arguments concerning these two types of collaborative procreation. First, Shanley believes that donor anonymity should be done away with because children have a right to know their conception history as part of their identity if they request that information after they are 18 years of age. Second, Shanley wants a more open and less market-driven practice in the transfer of gametes. Thus, Shanley is not against a market in sperm and eggs but against the differential pricing of human gametes. In fact, although some countries have been able to make it a charitable act, Shanley readily admits that in the United States changing gamete transfer to something other than a market activity will be an uphill battle. …