from Parenting & Family
The report was sponsored by the Commission on Parenthood's Future in cooperation with the Institute for American Values and authored by Elizabeth Marquardt, Principal Investigator.
In the Executive Summary, Marquardt observes: "This report argues that around the world the state is taking an increasingly active role in defining and regulating parenthood far beyond its limited, vital, historic, and child-centered role in finding suitable parents for needy children through adoption."
The report details the legislative actions being taken in various governments that completely redefine the family and the responsibilities of mothers and fathers for the rearing of children.
The most significant changes taking place around the world are being fueled by efforts to legalize same-sex marriage. Canada, for example, has erased the term "natural parent" from its laws and replaced it with the term "legal parent." In Quebec, a lesbian partner of a biological mother can register as the father on a birth certificate.
In Spain, after legalizing same-sex marriage, lawmakers now require the words "Progenitor A" and "Progenitor B" on birth certificates. In Australia and New Zealand, lawmakers have proposed making sperm donors the third parent in a family. In the U.S., judges have created the concept of the "psychological parent" and have removed children from a biological mother and given custody to the non-biological lesbian partner after a break up.
Marquardt notes that while there is much research promoting the idea that same-sex parenting is no different than heterosexual parenting, a survey of the studies show major limitations and design flaws in them. Steven Nock, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, for example, reviewed several hundred such studies and concluded that all of them "contained at least one fatal flaw of design or execution" and "not a single one of those studies was conducted according to general accepted scientific standards of research."
Professor Nock submitted a brief on a same-sex marriage case in Canada. In it, he presented his findings.
In her own research, Marquardt found that the issue of same-sex marriage has also energized individuals and organizations that favor polyamory and polygamy as legitimate lifestyles. Polyamory "involves relationships of three or more people, any two of whom might or might not be married to one another," said Marquardt. Support for polygamory is growing among academics, including University of Chicago Law Professor Elizabeth Emens, who published a defense of polyamory titled, "Beyond Conjugality."
Marquardt warns: "This much is clear: When society changes marriage it changes parenthood. ... The legalization of same-sex marriage, while sometimes seen as a small change affecting just a few people, raises the startling prospect of fundamentally breaking the legal institution of marriage from any ties to biological parenthood."