By Benjamin Lange.

In my recent JME paper, Moral Parenthood: Not Gestational, I challenge the idea that the moral right to parent our biological children should be grounded by appeal to the value of the intimate emotional relationship that gestation facilitates between a newborn and a gestational procreator.

This issue is important because it addresses one of the most foundational aspects of family life: our partiality towards our biological children. The question of what grounds a moral right to parent a biological child is often assumed to be self-evident, but closer scrutiny reveals complexities that challenge these assumptions.

The discussion overall has implications for contemporary discussions on family ethics and parental rights, particularly in cases of adoption, surrogacy, and reproductive technology. It also has implications for legislation in these areas. If we cannot justify exclusive parental rights based on gestation, we may need to rethink how we assign parental responsibilities and rights, potentially moving towards alternative models.

For those interested in exploring these ideas further, I invite you to read the full paper in this journal or my recently published account on the acquisition of parental rights, where I defend a project account of the acquisition of the moral right to parent particular children.

Paper: Moral parenthood: not gestational

Author: Benjamin Lange

Affiliations: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany; Munich Center for Machine Learning, Munich, Germany

Competing interests:  None declared