The legal construction of same-sex collaborative co-parenting in the UK and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empirical studies have revealed that a significant minority of lesbian and gay couples and individuals parent in ways that are not reflected by the heteronormative understandings of the family that underpin legal recognition. A striking example of this is collaborative co-parenting, also referred to as poly-parenting, where a child is conceived through artificial reproduction and both biological parents (and potentially their same-sex partners) remain involved in the child’s life. These families, where parenting does not necessarily occur solely within the context of an intimate relationship, challenge Martha Fineman’s notion of the sexual family, which remains influential in family law in the UK and elsewhere. What is more, these families may involve more than two adults with potential parental claims in relation to the child, which presents a direct challenge to the current limitation to two parents in UK family law. This paper discusses a small-scale qualitative interview study with same-sex parents, legal and other professionals in the UK and Canada in relation to their experiences of the legal framework surrounding family formation and recognition. The reason Canada was chosen as a comparator jurisdiction is that British Columbia has recently become the first jurisdiction to legislatively recognise multiple parents in the context of collaborative co-parenting. Therefore, the paper explores the advantages of dealing with this issue through legislation rather than the ad hoc case-by-case basis adopted in the UK. The paper will also consider the limitations of the legal reform models adopted in Canada and the UK in giving legal effect to the lived realities of this group of same-sex families. This will include discussion of the role that written agreements play in collaborative co-parenting arrangements, as well as the potential for recognising different sorts of parental figures in a child’s life through a more nuanced model of legal recognition. One particularly prominent theme that has emerged in the academic discussion of collaborative co-parenting families is that parenting within them is remains a gendered phenomenon. Feminist scholars have highlighted the need to take into account the gendered nature of family law generally and the unequal distribution of caregiving in these families. The impact of gendered norms surrounding the family and the influence of fathers’ rights discourse is undoubtedly of central importance. However, an overlooked issue in this debate is the gendered nature of reproduction itself and how this impacts differently on legal recognition for lesbian and gay male parents. This raises issues surrounding the ability to be registered on the child’s birth certificate, which is open to female couples that conceive through artificial insemination, compared to the requirement to obtain a court order for male couple who conceive with the involvement of a surrogate. Legal recognition can be an important aspect of family life, particularly in relation to same-sex families. Therefore, in exploring the issues outlined above, this paper hopes to contribute to the debate surrounding the legal response to these novel and potentially transformative collaborative co-parenting arrangements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".