Philosophers put forward theories about how one becomes a parent, morally speaking, and thus how one acquires parental rights. We also offer accounts of the scope and the strength of such rights and attempt to figure out how parental rights interact with children’s rights and the rights of the state. The state enacts policies about parenthood and parental rights, sometimes informed by philosophical and legal thinking about rights, and sometimes not. This chapter sets out to explore the relationship between some of the philosophical thinking about parental rights and some of the public policies that concern such rights. It begins with a story about how two particular people became co-parents in Canada. I chose this story because it has a happy ending and it shows that the paths to parenthood can be complicated. The story also shows how the regulation of parenting is connected to the heteronormative paradigm of coupledom, even as members of liberal societies relax and soften our views about same-sex marriages and same-sex family making. It ought to be of concern both to those who are opposed to the hegemony of the nuclear family and supportive of alternative family making and to those who, regardless of their views about the family, think that the state ought not to be involved in promoting some lifestyles and personal life choices over others.
What is the nuclear family ideal? Daniela Cutas and Sarah Chan in Families: Beyond the Nuclear Ideal look at relationships that challenge the ideal of the nuclear family. They begin by describing that ideal in this way: “That children should be conceived naturally, born to and raised by their two young, heterosexual, married to each other, genetic parents; that this relationship between parents is also the ideal relationship between romantic or sexual partners; and that romance and sexual intimacy ought to be at the core of our closest personal relationships—all these elements converge towards the ideal of the nuclear family” (Cutas and Chan 2012).
Increasingly, the nuclear family ideal is not the norm in the social realities in which we live. In Canada, for example, the nuclear family as described by Cutas and Chan is no longer the predominant family arrangement. Instead, according to the 2011 Canadian census, which polled 9.4 million Canadians, families are living in a wider range of structures from living alone to extended families under one roof to empty nesters to blended families of divorced parents and step children. “Just a quarter of our households now are that traditional mom, dad, the kids and the dog at home. A lot of people still think that’s the Canadian family,” said Doug Norris, chief demographer at Environics Analytics (Campion-Smith 2012).
Families are changing, and our theorizing about the family and our policymaking has not really caught up. I’m interested in the extent to which we have moved toward recognition of assisted reproduction and the acceptance of same-sex parenting but have kept the normative ideal of two romantic partners as heads of the family, as parents. You can see how this plays out in the assignment of parental rights.
In 2017, a story about two academic colleagues and friends and their wish to become legally recognized co-parents hit the news in Canada. University of Ottawa law professors Natasha Bakht and Lynda Collins are friends, colleagues, and neighbors, but a lawsuit was necessary to make them both mothers of the same child. The issue isn’t, as you might think at first, that they are two women and a same-sex couple. Instead, the issue is that they aren’t a couple at all. Bahkt and Collins are friends and colleagues with an interest in shared parenting. And because they aren’t romantic partners, they couldn’t both be mothers to the same profoundly disabled boy, according to law.
The background is as follows: Bakht gave birth to her son in 2010 with her friend Collins there for labor support. The child, Elaan, didn’t develop as expected, and at six months he was diagnosed by a neurologist as being profoundly disabled. The boy, now seven, has cerebral palsy, asthma, and epilepsy. Collins was close to the boy and played an active role in helping with childcare and medical appointments. Eventually she bought a condo in the same building to be close to Natasha and Elaan. After a time the two women realized that she was taking on the role of co-parent with none of the legal rights or protections and they set out to fix that. Though their legal petition for the recognition of parental rights was successful and the story ended happily, the contrast between how things proceeded as friends versus how they would have proceeded as romantic partners is striking. If the two women were romantic partners with a conjugal relationship, it would have been easy. As Bakht’s romantic partner, Collins could have simply adopted the child in what’s known as “second-parent adoption.” Second-parent adoption is the traditional means by which same-sex partners come to be the parents of children when they are partnered with the biological parent. Instead they had to make a legal case for the assignment of the legal role of parent in court in front of a judge. However, the law changed shortly after this decision to reflect the view that second-parent adoption was itself unfair and failed to treat same-sex couples equally. After all, in opposite-sex couples the non-gestational parent doesn’t have to adopt the child even if the father is not biologically related to the offspring. This would be the case where donor sperm was used, for example.
The All Families Are Equal Act came into force in Ontario in 2017, and it will alter the legal precedent set by Collins and Bakht. Under the All Families Are Equal Act, Ontarians who have used reproductive services such as sperm donation or surrogacy no longer have to apply to the court to be confirmed a parent. But co-parents need to have entered into a written agreement before conception. Bakht and Collins didn’t have such an agreement, so the new law would have excluded them. In the future, would-be co-parents in a similar situation will have to go to court again.
The Bakht and Collins case raise two broad questions: Who gets to parent a child? By what criteria are those decisions made? Their case focuses on the assignment of parental rights to people who wish to take on those rights and responsibilities. But issues also arise when people have those rights and responsibilities and the state judges that it is necessary to remove them. A wide range of government policies touch on the subject of procreation and parenting. While some arguments affect policy decisions but not individual decisions about procreation, and other arguments apply only at the individual level, there are also cases in which these two can be unexpectedly intertwined. Policies that concern who gets to parent a child (as opposed to bear a child, or contribute genetic material to the bringing of a child into existence) arise in a wide range of contexts, including prisons and other correctional institutions, child welfare agencies, as well as in courtrooms that resolve custody and visitation disputes.
These first policies primarily concern the allocation or removal of parental rights, but there are also policies that control who gets to parent in the first place. This second set of policies is more controversial. Think about proposals for parental licensing and their justification, for example. While parental licensing for biological and gestational parents is thought to be an extreme measure, there are existing policies that cover much the same ground when it comes to access to parenthood through adoption and through reproductive technology, such as in-vitro reproduction. What connection ought there to be between these policies? Should they be the same? A third set of policies concern state assistance in becoming a parent. For those parents who pass some standard, should the government help them financially in their quest to become parents? Consider the example of assisted reproductive technology. There are questions of access and questions of financial assistance, both of which vary from place to place. But also there is a great deal of variability about who has access to the technology and the financial assistance. Just infertile opposite-sex couples who are married? Same-sex couples? Potential co-parents who are not romantic partners? (Other controversial grounds of exclusion include weight and age.)
Recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in the area of applied ethics and political philosophy that falls under the heading “philosophy and the family” (Brighouse and Swift 2016; Hannan, Brennan, and Vernon 2015; McLeod and Bagattini 2014; Brennan and Noggle 2007; Archard 2004, 2011). This is a broad area covering such topics as children’s rights, parents’ rights, justice between families, justice within families, the obligations children have to their parents, and what counts as a family. The part of this literature with which this chapter is concerned is who gets to raise children. While some of this work is decidedly in the realm of personal ethics, such discussions of the ethical choice to procreate given various facts about childbearing and rearing and the state of the world, other work has a more direct connection to policy since it concerns what the state may or may not do to encourage or restrict who may become a parent (Hannan, Brennan, and Vernon 2015).
Now some may begin by asking why the state has any say at all. If children were in some way their parents’ property or were otherwise morally secondary to them, then the grounds for state intervention in parenting would indeed be limited. Some theorists who hold versions of such views, such as Jan Narveson (2001, chap. 19) and David Gauthier (1986, 268), limited by the thin conceptual resources of their contract-based rights theories, admit that they cannot place constraints on the treatment of children on the basis of any claims to moral status children might have. Children aren’t able to make and keep contracts, and neither are they rights bearers. Rather, children are either left as part of the terrain of natural sentiment, and the natural caring instincts of parents, or constraints on the treatment of children are argued for on the basis of third-party effects on other adults. It is hard to reconcile the reliance on natural sentiment with the numbers of children who are beaten, abused, and neglected at the hands of family members. The third-party effects argument gets better results but might get the right results for the wrong reasons. The ground of restrictions on harming children doesn’t seem like it should be the bad effects such harm has on other adults (Narveson 2001; Brennan 2016).
That this line of argument brings about the horrified reaction that it does shows that very few people, in fact, believe that children have no independent moral status. Most people believe that children have moral status, the kind of moral status that imposes constraints on what may be done to them. Another way of putting this point is to say that children have rights. While we can disagree about whether those rights are foundational or whether they merely point to justified moral and legal rules about how children must be treated, in some sense or other we all believe that children have rights. Do the rights ground the constraints, so that rights and constraints are different things and rights are foundational, or are rights and constraints just different ways of making the same normative point, such that neither is foundational? Are the rights that children possess equal rights, when compared to adult right holders? (Purdy 1992) What do children’s rights protect? Do their rights protect their choices or their interests? (Brennan 2002) Again, on all of these questions, there is a scope for disagreement. Finally, insofar as children’s rights protect their interests philosophers may disagree about in what their interests consist. For example, children have some interests in the well-being and autonomy of the adult person they are to become, but they may also have interests in well-being as a child, in the goods of childhood for their own sake (Feinberg 1980; Brennan 2016). There is also a growing literature about children’s well-being that speaks to this point (Skelton 2015; McLeod and Bagattini 2014). Philosophers are interested in the question of whether there are distinctive aspects to childhood well-being.
If children are persons, then the state has an obligation to see that their rights are not violated and that their well-being is promoted. At a minimum then, philosophical arguments about children’s moral status speak in favor of policies to protect children. While people may disagree about the strength and limits of such policies, most governments accept that organizations such as child welfare agencies ought to be established to make sure parents meet some reasonable standard of “good enough” parenting. It’s inevitable that controversy arises over what that means exactly and philosophers fall on different sides of most of these issues. For example, should parental smoking around children be legally prohibited (Brennan and White 2008)? Should parents be legally allowed to physically discipline children (Turner 2002; Benatar 1998)? Could strongly homophobic people ever make adequate parents (Brennan and McLeod 2016)? Further, some obligations to promote a child’s welfare and autonomy fall on the state directly. Education, for example, is usually thought of as a political rather than personal, or parental, obligation (Weinstock forthcoming).
So while there are rules about what parents may or may not do to children, as a matter of public policy these rules get enforced only after parents have broken them. Child abuse and neglect are typically reported to child welfare agencies who follow up, investigate, and possibly take action, such as removing the child from the home and placing the child in temporary care elsewhere. Social workers who are employed by child welfare agencies watch out for children thought to be living in situations with abuse and neglect. It’s an expensive and intrusive process. It’s also been a process that involves standards of “good enough” care that include racist and classist assumptions about parenting. In Canada and the United States, there is a history in which state entities removed Indigenous children from their homes and communities but without proper regard for those children’s welfare or the parents’ rights. Thinking carefully about standards for good parenting and how to avoid bias in enforcing those standards is a task facing those responsible for policy in the area of child welfare.
If we know that some people are likely to make bad parenting decisions and harm their children, why do we let them parent children in the first place? Current legal frameworks in Canada and in the United States, indeed within much of the Western world, operate within very strong assumptions about parental rights. Children may be persons, not property, but they are raised by their biological parents rather than by, for example, whatever parents would be judged to do the best job. Courts may use the “best interests of the child” standard in some cases but not in the case of determining parental rights. Instead, there is a very strong presumption that biological parents get to raise the children they bear. Anca Ghaeus (2012) defends the presumptive right of biological parents to keep and rear their children on the grounds that to do otherwise would be unfair to biological parents. Ghaeus argues that denying birth parents who would make at least adequate parents the right to keep their baby would be unfair to them and would destroy already-formed parent–baby relationships, which she assumes are intrinsically valuable (Ghaeus 2012). This right is only presumptive though, and some philosophers have argued that this presumption is defeasible and that parents ought to be licensed (Lafolette 2002). Marissa Moschella (2016) offers a stronger view of parental rights that appeals to natural rights. On this account, licensing would not be permitted. Children, on this view, belong to families and live under the authority of their parents. Combining Moschella’s main idea with Robert Nozick’s (1974, xix) famous slogan, parent’s rights are so strong that there is very little that the state may do to children without parental consent.
Parental licensing obviously raises a host of issues. There are those philosophers who think that it would be justified if we could make it work and their worries are connected to the practicalities of the various licensing proposals (Vopat 2007). As public policy, parental licensing tests might be difficult to both devise and enforce. As mentioned previously, one might worry about the history of racism in Canada and in the United States and the extent to which judgments about “good enough” parenting may be about racist standards. This is true in Canada with its history of removing children from Indigenous families, first into the residential school system and later, into the foster care system. You might also reasonably worry about the existence of good care-giving alternatives. If not the biological parents, then who?
A different set of arguments about licensing concern the lack of consistency between standards for biological parents and the standards we use for deciding which parents get to adopt. In the case of adoption it’s nothing like the simple course and quick test that most licensing proposals endorse. Adoptive parents must usually take a parenting course, procure a home study, and undergo extensive psychological scrutiny and means testing to determine their suitability to become parents. Carolyn McLeod and Andrew Botterell (2014) write that the status quo on parental licensing in most Western jurisdictions is that licensing is required in the case of adoption but not in the case of assisted or unassisted biological reproduction. They argue against parental licensing for adoptive parents on grounds of consistency between biological parenting and adoption (McLeod and Botterell 2014). Of course, the consistency argument could go the other way. You might be so convinced that licensing is required for biological parents because it is required and justified for adoptive parents.
In addition to questions of licensing and “good enough” parenting, the state also has policies about how many parents a child can have, and philosophers may worry that these policies are inadequate in light of the creation of alternative models of family. The traditional legal answer, in Canada and the United States at least, is that a child can have at most two parents. A child can have zero parents, one parent, or two parents, and no other number is usually allowed. Note that the claim here isn’t just that it’s better to have two parents. As a matter of law, it is not possible in many places to have more than two parents. While this answer has an obvious biological underpinning, it seems inadequate given the realities of children in many families such as those who are born as a result of assisted reproductive technology. It also seems odd, on the face of it, to specify a maximum number of parents when you might think the real public policy crisis concerns children who don’t have enough parents wanting to care for them. Also, given the many routes by which one may become a parent and the different roles would-be parents can play—gestational parent, provider of genetic material, intentional parent—it seems unjustified to place a numerical limit on parents.
In a previous paper, my coauthor Bill Cameron and I explored the variety of circumstances in which a child can acquire multiple parents (Brennan and Cameron 2015). With donor sperm and eggs, surrogate mothers, and intentional parents there can be many adults involved in the birth of the child—indeed, on any reasonable notion of “biological,” a child can certainly have three biological parents, between the man whose sperm is used, the woman whose ova are used, and the woman who gestates the child. There are children born of three genetic parents in which mitochondrial DNA are transferred to create hybrid eggs, which, when fertilized with sperm, become three genetic parent embryos. Usually this is done in order to avoid genetically inherited disease (Klugman 2016). But it is not just biological parents. The number of parents easily extends beyond one or two when we move to include social parents. Consider the children of divorce and blended families. Consider too adopted children who may have three sets of parents: biological parents, foster parents, and adoptive parents. In light of these changes in family structures, we argued in that paper that a two-person restriction on the number of parents a child can have seems arbitrary. It seems as if current policies make room for nontraditional families by trying to make them, legally speaking, resemble the traditional model. In cases where more than two adults are in a “parent-like” relationship with the child, restricting the number of legal parents to two runs the risk of both violating the rights of an unrecognized parent or parents and going against the best interests of the child. Some philosophers argue that not only are families with more than two parents not worse than the traditional two-parent family, in certain respects they are better for the child (Cutas 2011).
Cameron and I began thinking about three (or more)-parent families in light of a 2007 ruling by Ontario’s highest court that allowed a young London, Ontario, boy to legally have three parents, making him the only child in Canada at that time with three legal parents. Since that time the government of British Columbia (BC) changed family law in that province to allow up to four names on a child’s birth certificate. A number of families in BC now have more than two legal parents from birth, but the rest of Canada has maintained two-parents-maximum policies.
The decision to allow multiple parents struck us as sensible, given the facts, but I was surprised to find out that the number of parents mattered, that it was thought to be significant from a policy perspective. In the London, Ontario, case the Ontario Court of Appeal decided unanimously to give legal parental status to the lesbian partner of a biological mother—giving the five-year-old boy three parents. The court also ruled that the Children’s Law Reform Act does not reflect current society and does not provide for the best interests of the child, who is raised by his mothers and visited by his biological father twice a week. The boy’s mother and her partner have been in a same-sex union since 1990. In 1999, they decided to begin a family with help from a friend. Both women were to be the child’s primary caregivers, but believed it would be in the child’s best interests for the biological father to be involved in his life as a parent. The mother and her partner did not apply for an adoption order for the nonbiological mother because if they did so, the father would lose his status under the Child and Family Services Act, Ontario’s legislation covering child protection and adoption. But denying the nonbiological mother parental rights ran serious risks for the family. For example, if the birth mother died without a declaration of parentage or some other order, the surviving partner would be unable to make decisions for their minor child, including critical decisions about health care.
The appellate court ruled that the provincial legislation dealing with issues of custody, the Children’s Law Reform Act, no longer reflects current society. “There is no doubt that the legislature did not foresee for the possibility of declarations of parentage for two women, but that is a product of the social conditions and medical knowledge at the time,” they wrote. The judges said a “gap in the legislation has been revealed,” and the statute does not reflect the best interests of the child in this case” (A.A. v. B.B. et al., [2007] 2 ONCA). The act does not deal with, nor contemplate, the disadvantages that a child born into a relationship with two mothers, two fathers, or as in this case two mothers and one father might suffer. Notably, however, the appellate court judges did not strike down the existing legislation. Though the court ruled that judges in Ontario have the jurisdiction to declare more than two persons to be legal parents of a child, the provincial legislation that allows only two parents stands untouched and other families who wish to recognize more than two parents would also have to undertake legal action in order to do so. The case also opens the door for other “non-traditional families” to consider seeking similar declarations. However, it will still be necessary for every such application in Ontario to be made before a family court judge—it is not possible to obtain declarations by filling out a form or applying over the counter. Judges will grant declarations of parentage only when to do so would be in the best interests of the child (Brennan and Cameron 2016).
Though the case that attracted our attention to the issue of how many parents a child can have was one that involved same-sex marriage and parenthood, there are, in fact, many circumstances that result in children having more than two adults acting in the role of parent. There are reasons for people to want to add a third parent. Think about older parents who find themselves with a high need or disabled child, or in circumstances where one of them becomes disabled. Other circumstances include the children of open adoption, gay and lesbian couples who decide to become parents together, and children who result from reproductive technology.
There are two different ways one might think about apportioning parental rights. The first and most common way is to think of parental rights as indivisible sets and that the entire set of rights belongs to everyone who properly holds the title of “parent.” Less common is to think of parental rights as bundles. Parental rights might then be divisible among adults. Melanie Jacobs (2007) favors this approach. Jacobs suggests that “disaggregating and redefining parentage may allow for recognition of all the relevant adults in a child’s life, yet not grant equal parental rights to all individuals” (Jacobs 2007, 313). This is currently what happens when children are in foster care. Foster parents receive only a small subset of parental rights, while the bulk of parental rights are held by the state.
The arguments for recognizing more than two parents tended to rest on parents’ rights and on arguments from the child’s best interests. So far the cases which have come to court concerning more than two parents have been ones in which all the would-be parents agree about who deserves parental status. In a society in which the real problem seems to be that there are children for whom no one cares, we could see no reason for the state not to recognize multiple parents. Most of the actual arguments against three (or more) parent families come from groups representing religious interests and traditional families. If we think the state ought to remain neutral among competing conceptions of the good life, especially among religious conceptions of the good life, then there is no policy reason to favor the two-parent (max) family.
One set of arguments the court didn’t consider concerns slippery slopes. While three or four parents might be fine, what about ten or twenty? What about communes and cults? Another argument the court didn’t hear that seems like it might be relevant concerns cases in which the potential parents are in conflict. Surely there is greater potential for disagreement with larger groups of decision makers. Finally, one might worry that if the responsibility for caring for children is distributed among too large a group no one will feel that they are individually responsible and the children might be worse off.
In response to this set of arguments, I would point out that conflict, disagreement, and neglect are not unique to multiparent families. As well, the existing child welfare policies would govern such families too. While communes who wish to parent children would be rare, the courts still have the “best interests of the child” test to help guide them through such choices.
Finally, in looking at the assignment of parental rights, I want to look at the question raised by the very first case discussed in this chapter. Why do we insist that parents be married or be in a marriage-like relationship in order to grant parental rights in some cases but not others? (I confess I find something very peculiar about the legal term “marriage-like relationship.” As a department chair I often had to write letters attesting that graduate students were in marriage-like relationships in order to get them access to family housing on campus. Sometimes I wondered what that meant I was claiming to know. Sex? But that seems very personal and not a necessary feature of actual married relationships. Bickering over the remote control and who takes out the garbage? Trivial. I just took their word for it.)
First, think about heterosexual sex, which can result in children and the assignment of parental rights with no requirement of marriage or romantic commitment. Indeed, marriage sometimes follows becoming a parent rather than the other way round. But in adoption, and in assisted reproductive technology, marriage or at least romantic partnership seems to be a requirement. You’ll recall in the case that opens this chapter that the two parents started as friends who wished to co-parent the child. But friendship and intent to co-parent were insufficient. It took a court case to get their status recognized. Likewise, two opposite-sex people who intend to be parents and appear at a clinic for assisted reproduction in Canada (perhaps because methods to get pregnant the low-tech way don’t work) will be charged thousands of dollars and the male person’s sperm is treated as donor sperm whereas similar services will be covered by a government health plan in some provinces if they are an infertile couple. Here “couple” means “romantic partners” and not “intended co-parents.”
Multiparent cases highlight a developing shift away from centering families around romantic bonds. For while some of these involve polyamorous unions, more often adults are in some configuration with different connections to the child. You might think there is an advantage of families founded around the intention to parent children, rather than on the fragile bonds of romantic love. First, it is clear that children benefit from stable family arrangements. Stability is a good thing for children. Second, we as a society are liberals about love. Most marriages end in divorce, and most divorced people remarry. We remain incredibly optimistic about marriage even as it no longer seems to last a lifetime. As a policy matter, we are unlikely as liberals to want to make marriage more difficult to leave. So maybe alternatives to marriage ought to be encouraged or at least permitted? In a second paper I coauthored with Bill Cameron (2016), we asked why the care of children should be conditional on the fragile bond of romantic-erotic love. Instead, we argued for parenting contracts and for distinguishing them from marriage. While we have argued that we ought to put less weight on romantic love and marriage, policies around child rearing and the assignment of parental rights seem to be resting more weight on the institution of marriage.
Increasingly individuals who wish to become parents are seeking out co-parents rather than romantic partners. The website Modamily (short for “modern family”) is a matchmaking website for people wishing to find co-parents. The site’s founder describes his motivation this way:
I noticed a good portion of family and friends spending their 20s and 30s focused on their careers and putting off starting a family. As they got older and more frustrated by the short term casual relationships they found on the popular dating apps of the day, they had limited options for finding a like-minded person who was ready to start a family. There came an enormous amount of pressure for finding a partner due to the ticking of the biological clock and family pressure. I wanted to build a platform where everyone is ready to start a family, either in a romantic, co-parenting, or known donor relationship. (Modamily 2017)
From a philosophical perspective, we might consider the rights and interests of children. Is there a child-centered reason to give preference to those in marriage or marriage-like relationships? We might think that children benefit from the model of two parents in a love relationship. Again, though, not all children have this. Biological children may be born out of wedlock, married people might be married and not actually be in love, or married people might divorce. As well, in an exclusive two-parent model, children might not be exposed to other kinds of adult relationships, such as friendship or extended family connections.
We also might consider questions of access to the goods of parenting for those people not in marriage or marriage-like relationships. If the role of parent is so important and can uniquely provide adults with certain goods, why deny that good to those not in committed, romantic relationships? Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift talk about the role of the goods of parenthood in establishing parental rights. What goods come from parenting?
The role enables them to exercise and develop capacities the development and exercise of which are, for many (though not, certainly, for all), crucial to their living fully flourishing lives. Through exercising these capacities in the specific context of the intimately loving parent-child relationship, a parent comes to learn more about herself, she comes to develop as a person, and she derives satisfactions that otherwise would be unavailable. The successful exercise of this role contributes to, and its unsuccessful exercise detracts from, the success of her own life as a whole. (Brighouse and Swift 2006, 95)
We began this chapter with a story about two friends and colleagues who became family because of a child. I want to close the chapter with a schoolyard rhyme that’s familiar to most of us: “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in the baby carriage.” I want to suggest that in the future of the family this order may well be reversed. Sometimes families form around children, and they’re at the center. This chapter is also a plea for more philosophical theorizing about who gets to parent. While there is substantive philosophical work on the right to parent, licensing, and standards of “good enough” parenting, public policymakers who look to philosophy for help with questions about numbers of parents or the requirement that would-be parents are also romantic couples will find there is very little there.
A.A. v. B.B. et al. 2007. 83 O.R. (3d) 561. Court of Appeal for Ontario, McMurtry C.J.O., Labrosse and Rosenberg JJ.A.
Archard, David. 2004. Children: Rights and Childhood. New York: Routledge.
Archard, David. 2011. The Family: A Liberal Defense. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Benatar, David. 1998. “Corporal Punishment.” Social Theory and Practice 24 (2): 237–60. doi:10.5840/soctheorpract19982423. ISSN 0037–802X.
Brennan, S. and A. White. 2008. “Responsibility and Children’s Rights: The Case for Restricting Parental Smoking,” in Taking Responsibility for Children, edited by S. Brennan and R. Noggle, 97–111. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Brennan, Samantha. 2002. Children’s Choices or Children’s Interests: Which Do Their Rights Protect?” in The Moral and Political Status of Children, edited by David Archard and Colin McLeod, 53–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brennan, Samantha. 2016. “The Goods of Childhood, Children’s Rights, and the Role of Parents as Advocates and Interpreters,” in Family-Making: Contemporary Ethical Challenges, edited by Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod, 29–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brennan, Samantha and Bill Cameron. 2015. “How Many Parents Can a Child Have? Philosophical Reflections on the ‘Three Parent Case.’ ” Dialogue 54: 45–61. doi:10.1017/S0012217314000705
Brennan, Samantha and Bill Cameron. 2016. “Is Marriage Bad for Children? Rethinking the Connection between Having Children, Romantic Love, and Marriage,” in Beyond Marriage, edited by Elizabeth Brake, chap. 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brennan, Samantha and Colin McLeod. 2016. “Fundamentally Incompetent: Homophobia, Religion and the Right to Parent,” in Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights: Ethical and Philosophical Issues, edited by Michael Cholbi and Jaime Ahlberg, chap. 12. London: Routledge.
Brennan, Samantha and Robert Noggle. 2007. Taking Responsibility for Children. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Brighouse, Harry and Adam Swift. 2006. “Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family.” Ethics 117: 80–108.
Brighouse, Harry and Adam Swift. 2016. Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Campion-Smith, Bruce. 2012. “Canadian Families Growing More Diverse, Census Data Shows.” Toronto Star, September 20, 2012, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/09/20/canadian_families_growing_more_diverse_census_data_shows.html.
Cutas, Daniela. 2011. “On Triparenting. Is Having Three Committed Parents Better Than Having Only Two?” Journal of Medical Ethics 37 (12): 735–38.
Cutas, Daniela and Sarah Chan. 2012. Families—Beyond the Nuclear Ideal. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Feinberg, Joel. 1980. “A Child’s Right to an Open Future,” in Whose Child? Parental Rights, Parental Authority and State Power, edited by W. Aiken and H. LaFollette, 124–53. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.
Gauthier, David. 1986. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gheaus, Anca. 2012. “The Right to Parent One’s Biological Baby.” Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (4): 432–55.
Hannan, Sarah, Samantha Brennan, and Richard Vernon. 2015. Permissible Progeny? Moral Considerations and Procreative Choice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jacobs, Melanie B. 2007. “Why Just Two? Disaggregating Traditional Parental Rights and Responsibilities to Recognize Multiple Parents.” Journal of Law & Family Studies 9: 309–39.
Klugman, Craig. 2016. “Thruple Babies: Born of Three Parents.” Bioethics Net, http://www.bioethics.net/2016/09/thruple-babies-born-of-3-parents/, accessed 12–16–2016.
Lafolette, Hugh. 1980. “Licensing Parents.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (2): 182–97.
McLeod, Carolyn and Andrew Botterell. 2014. “Not for the Faint of Heart: Assessing the Status Quo on Adoption and Parental Licensing,” in Family Making: Contemporary Ethical Challenges, edited by Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod, 151–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McLeod, Colin and Alexander Bagattini, eds. 2014. The Nature of Children’s Well-Being: Theory and Practice. Dordrecht: Springer.
Modamily. 2017. “About Us.” Accessed December 12, 2017. http://www.modamily.com/about-us/.
Moschella, Marissa. 2016. To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children’s Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Narveson, Jan. 2001. The Libertarian Idea. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Purdy, Laura. 1992. In Their Best Interest?: The Case against Equal Rights for Children. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Skelton, Anthony. 2015. “Children’s Well-being: A Philosophical Analysis,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being, edited by Guy Fletcher, 366–77. London: Routledge.
Turner, Susan. 2002. Something to Cry About: An Argument Corporal Punishment of Children in Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Vopat, Mark. 2007. “Parent Licensing and the Protection of Children,” in Taking Responsibility for Children, edited by Samantha Brennan and Robert Noggle, 73–96. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Weinstock, Daniel. Forthcoming. “For a Political Philosophy of Parent—Child Relationships.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.