In Re G, the Court of Appeal awarded a joint residence order to the appellant, who was the lesbian ex-partner of the child’s full biological mother. The award also indirectly vested the appellant, a social parent, with parental responsibility and extended a body of case law to same-sex couples, which had until now only been applied to heterosexual couples. The initial purpose of this note is to outline the legal issues of the case in the context of the framework of (...) parental responsibility set out in the Children Act 1989, putting forward a test of ‘parental fitness’ (which focuses on active ‘care’ as its central consideration) for social parents who must appeal to the court’s discretion to obtain parental responsibility. Secondly, the note offers at once a positive reading of Re G while highlighting a number of reservations centring upon continued legal preference for the ‘sexual family’. It is argued that while the legal recognition of ‘family diversity’ and parenthood remains modelled on this ‘sexual family’, the relaxation of family ‘boundaries’ (despite legal victories such as Re G) will remain limited. (shrink)

Lesbian-feminism typically rejects lesbian and gay family, marriage, and parenting, because these practices neither transform gender relations nor challenge the maternal imperative and women’s location in a depoliticized, domestic sphere. I argue that this lesbian-feminist view neglects the historical construction of lesbians and gay men as outlaws to the family. The 1880’s-1990s image of the mannish lesbian, the 1930s-1950s image of the homosexual child molester, and the 1980s-1990s image of lesbian and gay “pretended family relationships” constructed lesbians and gays as (...) constitutionally unfit for family, marriage, and parenting. These images helped displace social anxiety that the heterosexual family was disintegrating from within onto the specter of the hostile outsider to the family. By masking heterosexuals’ own family-disrupting behavior, these constructions of lesbians and gays as natural outlaws to the family serve to reserve the private sphere for heterosexuals only. (shrink)

This note examines the British case of Broidy v. St Helen's andKnowsley Health Authority in which Margaret Broidy was unsuccessful in anegligence action against the defendant Health Authority following an emergency caesareanoperation in which a hysterectomy had been performed as `essential'. Of particularfeminist interest is the fact that Broidy's claim for, inter alia, the costs of asurrogacy arrangement to be carried out in California was refused on the basis that it wasnot reasonable – the chances of success of the surrogacy (...) arrangement being deemed tooremote. Set within the context of an increasingly prolific number ofworld-wide surrogacy stories, the Broidy decision is analysed as providing a recentillustration of some of the difficult implications of the reproductive option which surrogacyhas now become. (shrink)

In Re D is the most recent in a line of cases to raise problems with the determination of legal fatherhood under s.28(3) of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. The judgments in In Re D are interesting in particular because they demonstrate the growing currency of the idea that a child has a right to ‘genetic truth’. They also further evidence the ‘fragmentation of fatherhood’. This case is best understood as part of a complex and ongoing negotiation of (...) men’s role in the family in the light of shifting family forms. (shrink)

Cornell takes readers on a highly original exploration of what it would mean for women politically, legally, and culturally, if they took the ideal of freedom seriously--if, in her words, they learn to recognize that "hearts starve as well as bodies". Challenging, passionate, and powerfully argued, Cornell's book is certain to have a major impact on the course of feminist thought.