Question Do parents have a responsibility to take care of their biological children. Or do they just have a responsibility to make sure their biological children are being taken care of (and it need not matter who does the actual taking care.) To illustrate the difference, suppose a wife and husband are perfectly capable of producing healthy children together. However, the wife has a demanding career and would rather avoid pregnancy. So the couple finds another woman who is willing to be inseminated by the husband, and pays her some money in exchange for delivering the baby. When the baby is born, he is genetically the son of the surrogate mother, however he will be taken care by the wife. Has the child been wronged, since his biological mother will not take of him? Or did the biological mother fulfill her obligation to her child (making sure he will be taken care of by someone, even if that person is not his biological mother?)

Accepted:
November 17, 2010

Comments

Anyone can look after a child well, and many of the best carers are not biologically related to the child. Those who are hostile to surrogacy do have a point though in wondering at whether the subsequent psychological and legal issues would bring in their train difficulties for the growing child. How flexibile can society allow its links between parents, carers and children to become?

We have quite rapidly moved away from a particular image of the traditional family where the father works, the mother stays at home with the children to a very different constellation of different arrangements, where there all sorts of domestic arrangements, and a nagging feeling that there must be something wrong about it all. Yet in the past the so-called traditional family was often replete with problems, and there is no reason to think that as the family changes it will not be able to reconstitute itself quite satisfactorily in a different form.