Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-Sex and Unwed Parents By Mary Lyndon Shanley. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. 206p. $27.00.

Extract

Mary Lyndon Shanley's Making Babies, Making Families bravely wades into the difficult ethical questions of accommodating new reproductive technologies and diverse family arrangements within the framework of existing and possible liberal legal principles. The book grapples with definitions of parenthood and parental rights in the contexts of adoption, unwed fatherhood, gamete transfer, surrogate motherhood, and multiple parenting within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Shanley mines these situations in order to derive some workable ethical and legal guidelines for the state's exercise of its regulatory capacities with respect to families. In doing so, she reveals the tensions and possibilities inherent in the state's role in defining families at a moment when many perceive traditional family structures as collapsing, for better or for worse.