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Full-Text Articles in Law
Sacred Children, Taboo Tradeoffs, And Distorted Discourses, Sean Hannon Williams
Sacred Children, Taboo Tradeoffs, And Distorted Discourses, Sean Hannon Williams
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Article brings together three literatures—bioethics, psychological research on taboo tradeoffs, and family law—to reveal pervasive distortions in current family law scholarship and judicial reasoning. Empirical work in bioethics shows that child welfare occupies a unique moral sphere. People routinely resist making tradeoffs between spheres. Just as sacrificing adult lives for money is taboo, so too is sacrificing child welfare for adult welfare. When faced with the prospect of these tradeoffs, people engage in a predictable set of avoidance and moral mitigation strategies. Across five case studies, this Article shows how child welfare has talismanic qualities which, even in the …
Children Of Assisted Reproduction, Kristine S. Knaplund
Children Of Assisted Reproduction, Kristine S. Knaplund
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
More than three decades after the birth of the first child conceived through in vitro fertilization, few states have comprehensive statutes to establish the parentage of children born using assisted reproduction techniques (ART). While thousands of such children are born each year courts struggle to apply outdated laws. For example, does a statute terminating paternity for a man who donates sperm to a married woman apply if the woman is unmarried? In 2008, the Uniform Probate Code (UPC) added two much-needed sections on the complicated parentage and inheritance issues that arise in the field of assisted reproduction. Yet it is …
Designating Male Parents At Birth, Jeffrey A. Parness
Designating Male Parents At Birth, Jeffrey A. Parness
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In focusing on legal designations of male parentage as of the time of birth, this Essay first reviews the methods by which such designations currently are made. The difficulties raised by contemporary methods then will be explored, together with suggested reforms involving laws that could promote earlier, more complete, and more accurate designations of male parentage as of the time of a child's birth.