This volume explores the ethics of making or expanding families through adoption or technologically assisted reproduction. For many people, these methods are separate and distinct: they can choose either adoption or assisted reproduction. But for others, these options blend together. For example, in some jurisdictions, the path of assisted reproduction for same-sex couples is complicated by the need for the partner who is not genetically related to the resulting child to adopt this child if she wants to become the child's legal parent.
The essays in this volume critically examine moral choices to pursue adoption, assisted reproduction, or both, and highlight the social norms that can distort decision-making. Among these norms are those that favour people having biologically related children ('bionormativity') or that privilege a traditional understanding of family as a heterosexual unit with one or more children where both parents are the genetic, biological, legal, and social parents of these children.
As a whole, the book looks at how adoption and assisted reproduction are morally distinct from one another, but also emphasizes how the two are morally similar. Choosing one, the other, or both of these approaches to family-making can be complex in some respects, but ought to be simple in others, provided that one's main goal is to become a parent.

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1

Part I.Families: Of Parents and Children

1.The Goods of Parenting 11

2.The Goods of Childhood and Children's Rights 29

Part II.Bionormativity: Philosophical and Empirical Perspectives

3.A Critique of the Bionormative Concept of the Family 49

4.The Families of Assisted Reproduction and Adoption 64

Part III.Becoming a Parent: Personal Choices

5.What is the Value of Procreation? 89

6.The Unique Value of Adoption 109

Part IV.Becoming a Parent: State Interests

7.State Regulation and Assisted Reproduction: Balancingthe Interests of Parents and Children 131

8."Not for the Faint of Heart": Assessing the Status Quo on Adoption and Parental Licensing 151

9.On Non-Biological Maternity, or "My Daughter is Going to be a Father!" 168

Part V.Special Responsibilities of Parents

10.Special Responsibilities of Parents Using Technologically Assisted Reproduction 185

11.Adoptee Vulnerability and Post-Adoptive Parental Obligation 198

12.The Political Geography of Whites Adopting Black Children in the United States 222

Part VI.Contested Practices

13.Analogies to Adoption in Arguments Against Anonymous Gamete Donation: Geneticizing the Desire to Know 239

14.Transnational Commercial Contract Pregnancy in India 265

15.Aged Parenting through ART and Other Means 287

Index 313

中国医科院医学信息研究所