Law Making for Baby Making: An Interpretive Approach to the Determination of Legal Parentage

Abstract

This article proposes a new model for analyzing legal issues arising from technological conception and uses it to develop rules to govern the legal parentage of technologically conceived children. Professor Garrison shows that most commentators on technological conception have employed a "top-down" methodology, deriving rules for specific cases from an abstract global principle such as reproductive autonomy, freedom of contract, or anticommodification. Professor Garrison critiques these and several other approaches, showing that they offer little concrete guidance in many cases, risk the introduction of discordant values into the law of parentage, and fail to capture all of the values that have traditionally guided parentage determination. In their place, she proposes an "interpretive methodology" which, by relying heavily on current rules governing parentage determination in other contexts, would assimilate technological conception within the broader law of parental obligation. Professor Garrison argues that cases of sexual and technological conception should be governed by similar rules because, despite mechanical differences between these two reproductive methods, there are no significant differences in the parent-child relationships that they produce. She demonstrates that the interpretive approach can cabin rule-making disagreements, and that it can generate comprehensive parentage rules that are based on uniform policy goals and that ensure consistent treatment of parent-child relationships.