PROCREATIVE HEALTH

❑Parenthood inhabits two distinct relationships: that between parent and child, and between the
parent (or family) and the larger society or other collective.

❑Each of these involves two morally significant kinds of claims, one covering the parent's duties, the
other the parent's rights.

❑We call these relationships, respectively, the custodial relationship and the trustee relationship.

❑The custodial relation between parent and child involves a set of rights and duties aimed at, and
justified by, the welfare of the child.

❑A full account of the custodial relationship requires a theory of the good, although many writers
follow Feinberg (1980) in working at a “meta-level”: parents owe their children an “open future,”
understood as one where they become adults capable of choosing their own conception of the good.

❑As custodian, the parent is under a limited obligation to work and organize his or her life around the
welfare and development of the child, for the child's sake.

❑Concomitantly, the parent is endowed with a special kind of authority over the child.

❑Societies, families, and cultural groups also have significant and sometimes compelling interests in the
welfare of children, and when the relationship between parent and any of these other subjects is
considered, the parental relationship is a kind of trustee relationship.

❑Trusteeship differs from custodianship: in the former, it is to the trustor that one owes the object's
welfare; in custodianship, it is to the object of the custodial right that one is obligated in seeking that
object's welfare.

GROUNDS OF PARENTHOOD

1. Genetic theories ground parenthood in the relation of direct genetic derivation.

2. Gestational Accounts in reproductive contexts in which a child's gestational mother differs from its
genetic mother — as happens in egg (or embryo) donation and gestational surrogacy — it is the
gestational mother who has the primary claim to parental rights and responsibilities.

3. Intentional Accounts intentionalists motivate their position by appeal to cases of the following kind.

❑ Intentionalists argue that because they “carefully and intentionally orchestrated the procreational
act, bringing together all the necessary components with the intention of creating a unique individual
whom they intend to raise as their own”

4. Causal Accounts holds that causing a child to exist is sufficient for generating parental rights and
responsibilities over that child.

❑According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2009), family is defined as “a group of people related by blood,
marriage or adoption living together”
❑Allender and Spradley (2008) define the family as “two or more people who live in the same
household, that shares a common emotional bond, and perform certain interrelated social task.”

❑Basic Family Types:

– Family or orientation – the family one is born into; or oneself, mother, father, siblings, etc.

– Family of procreation – a family one establishes; or oneself, spouce or signifiacant othes and
children.