WHO’S YOUR DADDY? My column in the National Catholic Register:

Who are a child’s parents?

It seems like a simple question–the kid’s mom and dad, right? The people who made the baby.

But for decades, legal and technological changes have been reshaping families, as reproductive techniques like sperm donation, egg donation, and surrogate motherhood become far more embedded in our culture than most of us realize.

Now we have kids with two moms, four moms, or none at all.

These technologies, and the legal tangles they create, have shifted us to an understanding of family that pretends bodies don’t matter, and denies children’s need for their own mother and father. Here are only a few examples of how what we might call “third-party reproduction” is reshaping our culture; hundreds such stories emerge every month.

more