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In yesterday’s post I took a step back from a detailed discussion of one or another form of parentage to try to make a point about overarching interests.   I wrote about the way the desire to ensure certainty with regard to becoming a parent is common to virtually all prospective parents whether they are in the process of becoming parents via adoption or surrogacy or conventional pregnancy.   It’s virtually universal.

But I had better note here that I mean “universal” in a limited sense, which must seem nearly oxymoronic and which is why I put “virtually” in there.   I reject the notion that what it means to be a parent is a fixed thing, never varying over time and culture.   It simply doesn’t seem to me that this can be true.  I am persuaded that childhood, as it exists today, is a construction of our modern culture.   People who lived in US cities two hundred years ago had a very different idea of childhood.   It wouldn’t occur to them that a fifteen-year old was incapable of working a full day, for example.  Or that a family begun by two sixteen-year-olds marrying and having children was problematic.   And if instead of varying historical period you varied cultural locale–moving through all the various cultures of the world–you’d find equally dramatic differences in the notion of what it meant to be a child.  

If a child is a different thing, depending on time and place, then surely a parent is as well?  In other words, our modern Western notions of what it means to be a parent are tied to our equally modern, equally Western notions of what it means to be a child.

It is in this context that I want to say that there is a general desire for certainty among those planning to become parents.   And it doesn’t much matter how they are going to become parents.

I think it is worth looking for those sorts of universals because it is so easy to become fixated on describing the differences between adoption and surrogacy, say.   And in doing so we may design law to rest too heavily on distinctions that aren’t really all that important in the end.

In a similar vein, if you collect a bunch of parents of two-year olds you’ll find they are all engrossed in the same sort of two-year-old issues. You’ll find a range of styles of parenting, of course.  I’m hardly going to contend there is complete uniformity.   But I’d be very surprised to find that you could generalize about which people became parents how.   Do you suppose you could tell, for example, that a heterosexual couple used donor sperm because the husband had fertility issues?  Or could you tell if they purchased an egg?

Of course there will be different forms of family.   Single parents, lesbian parents, divorced parents and so on.   And different forms of family have different issues to contend with.   But those difference are more closely tied to things like gender norms than they are to the manner in which children were brought into people’s lives.   Is a single mother who adopts so very different from a single mother who gives birth, assuming both choose to be parents?

It’s this sense of overarching commonality that makes me want to define parenthood without weighing the manner of conception, say.   This makes me resistant to special rules of parenthood for surrogacy, say.