Defining the Family Law, Technology, and Reproduction in An Uneasy Age [Hardcover]

Defining the Family: Law, Technology, and Reproduction in an Uneasy Ageprovides a sweeping portrait of the family in American law from the nineteenth century to the present. The family today has come to be defined by individuality and choice. Pre-nuptial agreements, non-marital cohabitation, gay and lesbian marriages have all profoundly altered our ideas about marriage and family. In the last few years, reproductive technology and surrogacy have accelerated this process of change at a breathtaking rate. Once simple questions have taken on a dizzying complexity: Who are the real parents of a child? What are the relationships and responsibilities between a child, the woman who carried it to term, and the egg donor? Between viable sperm and the wife of a dead donor?

The courts and the law have been wildly inconsistent and indecisive when grappling with these questions. Should these cases be decided in light of laws governing contracts and property? Or it is more appropriate to act in the best interests of the child, even if that child is unborn, or even unconceived? No longer merely settling disputes among family members, the law is now seeing its own role expand, to the point where it is asked to regulate situations unprecedented in human history. Janet L. Dolgin charts the response of the law to modern reproductive technology both as it transforms our image of the family and is itself transformed by the tide of social forces.

Janet Dolgin provides an overview of clashing conceptions of family as revealed in the struggle of courts to deal with the impact of various forms of reproductive technology.

Carefully researched . . . In Professor Dolgin's view, the family carried forward the feudal structure of hierarchy, mutual loyalty and lack of individual autonomy into the modern era until, like other institutions, it came under stress from the overriding reality of modern life: marketplace economics.