Family-Making ─ Contemporary Ethical Challenges

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.

Francoise Baylis is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy at Dalhousie University, and founder of the NovelTechEthics research team. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Assisted human reproduction, research involving women, public health ethics, relational identity are but a few of the topics on which she works. In addition to her academic research, she contributes to national policy via government research contracts, membership on national committees and public education. This work--all of which is informed by a strong commitment to the common good--focuses largely on issues of justice and community.

Carolyn McLeod is Associate Professor of Philosophy, an Affiliate Member of Women's Studies and Feminist Research, and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. Most of her research deals with moral dilemmas that occur in reproductive health care and with the moral concepts needed to resolve these dilemmas. She has tackled moral dilemmas having to do, for example, with miscarriage, infertility, contract pregnancy, fertility preservation, and conscientious refusals by health care professionals to provide standard services such as abortions. She has also written about--among other concepts--autonomy, trust, integrity, objectification, and conscience.