The Moral and Legal Status of Children and Parents

Abstract

In conceptually outlining the moral controversy surrounding the status of children and parents and briefly tracing the historical evolution of the legal status of children, this chapter provides a foundation for considering the numerous, more specific pediatric bioethical controversies discussed in this book. The chapter starts with a discussion of some common intuitions about families that find expression in our developed social norms. The tension reflected in competing moral understandings of the proper relationship between parents and their children bubbles to the surface in modern American law. Transparent recognition of the problems we face in socially constructing the optimal relationship between children and their parents nowadays disguises a historical tendency in American law to grant tremendous deference to parents in almost all family matters. Almost all pediatric bioethical controversies taken to the courtroom nowadays turn on an intractable disagreement about how best to understand the posited harm to the child.