Law lecture examines parenting, genetics and the law

Douglas NeJaime, Anne Urowsky Professor of Law at Yale Law School, will discuss the origins of what the public has assumed are children’s true parents, parentage laws, and the role of genetic or gestational status in his lecture “True Parenthood”.  This event, the 2022 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law Lecture, will be held 12:15 p.m., Wednesday, April 20, online virtually and in-person in Rm. 114 at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.

CLE: Application has been approved for 1.0 CLE in OH and KY both virtually and in person.  Attendees who wish to attend virtually can register via the registration button below.  Please register in advance.

Judges, lawmakers, commentators, and the public routinely assume that a child’s true parents are her biological parents. Legislatures too often adopt parentage laws that exclude nonbiological parents. Courts too often prefer an absent biological parent over a person who has been parenting the child but in the absence of a biological connection. While this preoccupation with biological parenthood presents itself as a natural and pre-political fact, it is in reality a modern construction. And it harms too many families, perpetuating troubling forms of exclusion and depriving children of the consistent parental care they deserve. This is not to say that biology does not matter. Instead, a focus on parent-child relationships that exist in fact, across diverse family forms, leads us to think about the biology of parenthood differently. Parenthood, as a biological concept, reflects the social dimensions of parenting. As emerging research on the parenting brain suggests, the “biological parent” is the person who commits to parenting and consistently cares for the child. It is that person, regardless of their genetic or gestational status, who is the child’s true parent.