Intended Parents and the Problem of Perspective

Abstract

When asked to identify the legal parents of a child, traditional family law principles look backwards in time, primarily to biology and to marriage. People using assisted reproductive technologies such as surrogacy, however, seek to manifest their intent to become parents with a forward-looking temporal perspective, before a child is conceived and born. This mismatch leaves a parentage void for children of assisted reproductive technologies that should be filled through the use of prebirth parentage orders recognizing intended parents as legal parents-to-be. Intent will not only ameliorate specific problems for such children, but also deepen normative values of parenting such as planning for parenthood, and minimize irrelevant characteristics such as gender.