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Articles 1 - 16 of 16
Full-Text Articles in Family Law
Originalism: Erasing Women From The Body Politic, Malinda L. Seymore
Originalism: Erasing Women From The Body Politic, Malinda L. Seymore
Faculty Scholarship
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the Court relied on originalism to excise women from the Constitution. Originalism is purposefully backward-looking. With cherry-picked history, the Court created a future that looks to the past: a past where unwed pregnancy is shameful and can be redeemed only by secret adoption. Yet the case has revealed originalism as a flawed method, harmed the legitimacy of the Court, and energized those supporting abortion rights.
Rich Dad, Gay Dad: The Wealth Traps Of Gay Fatherhood, Aloni Erez
Rich Dad, Gay Dad: The Wealth Traps Of Gay Fatherhood, Aloni Erez
All Faculty Publications
While legal and societal progress has enabled gay fathers to form families, there remains a critical blind spot in our understanding of their financial wellbeing. Specifically, there are indications that a wealth gap may exist among gay father households. This article introduces a novel taxonomy of the mechanisms that likely contribute to a wealth gap for these households, including surrogacy and adoption costs, legal recognition expenses, parental leave policies, discrimination in housing and borrowing, and limited support from families of origin. These obstacles reflect the structural features and prejudices that disproportionately affect households led by non-heterosexual fathers. The article highlights …
Surrogacy And Parenthood: A European Saga Of Genetic Essentialism And Gender Discrimination, Mélanie Levy
Surrogacy And Parenthood: A European Saga Of Genetic Essentialism And Gender Discrimination, Mélanie Levy
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
This paper tells a story of shifting normativities, from tradition to modernity and back, regarding the recognition of legal parenthood in non-traditional families created through crossborder surrogacy. The cross-border nature of the surrogacy is often forced as most domestic legal frameworks in Europe still restrict the creation of non-traditional families through assisted reproductive technologies. Once back home, these families struggle to have birth certificates recognized and establish legal parenthood. The disjuncture between social reality and domestic law creates a situation of legal limbo. In its recent case law, the European Court of Human Rights has pushed for domestic authorities to …
The Haunting Of Her House: How Virginia Law Punishes Women Who Become Mothers Through Rape, Jordan S. Miceli
The Haunting Of Her House: How Virginia Law Punishes Women Who Become Mothers Through Rape, Jordan S. Miceli
Washington and Lee Law Review Online
If a rape victim becomes pregnant following the attack, she has three options: abort the pregnancy, place the child for adoption, or keep and raise the child. However, by requiring proof of conviction of rape to terminate the parental rights of the man who fathered that child through his rape, the Commonwealth of Virginia imposes a substantial burden on a victim weighing those options. To obtain a conviction under the current scheme, a victim, through her local prosecutor, has to prove to a jury that the accused committed the rape beyond a reasonable doubt. The Commonwealth requires proof of conviction …
Arizona's Torres V. Terrell And Section 318.03: The Wild West Of Pre-Embryo Disposition, Catherine Wheatley
Arizona's Torres V. Terrell And Section 318.03: The Wild West Of Pre-Embryo Disposition, Catherine Wheatley
Indiana Law Journal
In this Note, Part I examines the three main approaches used in other state supreme court decisions to decide pre-embryo disposition disputes, as well as three perspectives on the legal status of the pre-embryo, and compares them with Arizona’s emerging law. Part II summarizes Arizona’s Torres trial court order and opinion and section 318.03. Part III then analyzes whether the Torres orders and Arizona’s new statutory “most likely to lead to birth standard”12 present constitutional issues and concludes that the trial court’s order, if reinstated by the Arizona Supreme Court, and section 318.03 can be challenged on substantive due process …
Fathers And Feminism: The Case Against Genetic Entitlement, Jennifer S. Hendricks
Fathers And Feminism: The Case Against Genetic Entitlement, Jennifer S. Hendricks
Publications
This Article makes the case against a nascent consensus among feminist and other progressive scholars about men's parental rights. Most progressive proposals to reform parentage law focus on making it easier for men to assert parental rights, especially when they are not married to the mother of the child. These proposals may seek, for example, to require the state to make more extensive efforts to locate biological fathers, to require pregnant women to notify men of their impending paternity, or to require new mothers to give biological fathers access to infants.
These proposals disregard the mother's existing parental rights and …
Grasping Fatherhood In Abortion And Adoption.Pdf, Malinda L. Seymore
Grasping Fatherhood In Abortion And Adoption.Pdf, Malinda L. Seymore
Malinda L. Seymore
New Thinking On Commercial Surrogacy, Richard F. Storrow
New Thinking On Commercial Surrogacy, Richard F. Storrow
Indiana Law Journal
Roundtable on Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technology 2012
Surrender And Subordination: Birth Mothers And Adoption Law Reform, Elizabeth J. Samuels
Surrender And Subordination: Birth Mothers And Adoption Law Reform, Elizabeth J. Samuels
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
For more than thirty years, adoption law reform advocates have been seeking to restore for adult adoptees the right to access their original birth certificates, a right that was lost in all but two states between the late 1930s and 1990. The advocates have faced strong opposition and have succeeded only in recent years and only in eight states. Among the most vigorous advocates for access are birth mothers who surrendered their children during a time it was believed that adoption would relieve unmarried women of shame and restore them to a respectable life. The birth mother advocates say that …
Displaced Mothers, Absent And Unnatural Fathers: Lgbt Transracial Adoption, Kim H. Pearson
Displaced Mothers, Absent And Unnatural Fathers: Lgbt Transracial Adoption, Kim H. Pearson
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
While some might believe that Black versus gay discourse only surfaces in highly politicized settings like the military and marriage, it holds sway in the area of LGBT transracial adoption. LGBT transracial adoptions are a relatively small percentage of all adoptions, which include private adoptions, LGBT second-parent adoptions, and step-parent adoptions, but they are an important site for interrogating the Black versus gay discourse because adoption and custody decisions often address parent-child transmission. When claims intersect, as they do in a case where a White LGBT foster parent and a Black maternal grandmother dispute the adoption of a Black child, …
Credit For Motherhood, Melissa Jacoby
Credit For Motherhood, Melissa Jacoby
Melissa B. Jacoby
This essay builds on prior work exploring the impact of consumer lenders who sell credit products for assisted reproduction and adoption. After reviewing some basic attributes of the parenthood lending market, the essay discusses how not-for-profit lenders promote traditional conceptions of motherhood and the division of carework in ways that credit discrimination laws were not designed to address. The essay also articulates some incentives of for-profit lenders to sell motherhood and potential implications for women who are ambivalent about becoming parents.
Price And Pretense In The Baby Market, Kimberly D. Krawiec
Price And Pretense In The Baby Market, Kimberly D. Krawiec
Kimberly D. Krawiec
Throughout the world, baby selling is formally prohibited. And throughout the world babies are bought and sold each day. As demonstrated in this Essay, the legal baby trade is a global market in which prospective parents pay, scores of intermediaries profit, and the demand for children is clearly differentiated by age, race, special needs, and other consumer preferences, with prices ranging from zero to over one hundred thousand dollars. Yet legal regimes and policymakers around the world pretend that the baby market does not exist, most notably through prohibitions against “baby selling” – typically defined as a prohibition against the …
The Debt Financing Of Parenthood, Melissa B. Jacoby
The Debt Financing Of Parenthood, Melissa B. Jacoby
Melissa B. Jacoby
In this contribution to the symposium Show Me the Money: Making Markets in Forbidden Exchange, I explore an under-appreciated participant in the assisted reproduction and adoption industries: consumer lenders. Through fertility clinics and other service providers, financial institutions market and distribute loans specifically to finance acquisition of treatments, drugs, and human eggs. Adoption foundations and agencies advertise for-profit loans to intended parents, while small foundations offer adoption loans that appear to be low-cost financially but may condition loan approval on intended parent characteristics such as religious observance, marital status, sexual orientation, and adherence to traditional gender roles. After discussing how …
Are You Still My Mother?: Interstate Recognition Of Adoptions By Gays And Lesbians, Rhonda Wasserman
Are You Still My Mother?: Interstate Recognition Of Adoptions By Gays And Lesbians, Rhonda Wasserman
Articles
Parents and their biological children routinely cross state borders safe in the assumption that the parent-child relationship will be recognized wherever they go. The central issue raised in this Article is whether the law guarantees parents and their adopted children the same security if the parents are gay. This question is part of a broader debate about the obligation of states to recognize changes in family status effected under the laws of other states, such as same-sex marriages and migratory divorces. The debate is divisive because it pits the family against the state; one state against another; and the needs …
Placing The Adoptive Self, Carol Sanger
Placing The Adoptive Self, Carol Sanger
Faculty Scholarship
[A]doption law and practices are guided by enormous cultural changes in the composition and the meaning of family. As families become increasingly blended outside the context of adoption – with combinations of blood relatives, step-relatives, de facto relatives, and ex-relatives sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner as a matter of course – birth families and adoptive families knowing one another may not seem so very strange or threatening at all. There will simply be an expectation across communities that ordinary families will be mixed and multiple. With that in mind, we should hesitate before establishing embeddedness as the source of …
Adoption Of Children In Missouri, Mary M. Beck
Adoption Of Children In Missouri, Mary M. Beck
Faculty Publications
The purpose of this Article is to investigate the effect of Missouri law on adoption and to determine whether its provisions adequately protect the parties to adoption and whether its degree of clarity properly forestalls litigation.