Parenthood is the interpersonal relationship between the parents and the conceived child. It is primarily responsibility for the actualization of all three dimensions of the child’s personhood, not possession or power of disposal. Parenthood begins with conception and encompasses upbringing as a long-term process of accompaniment.
In the natural order, genetic, gestational, and social motherhood or fatherhood are united in one person. Reproductive-medical procedures can fragment this unity. This contradicts the personal unity of the parent-child relationship. Parenthood is grounded in marriage and realizes itself in the family.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: interpersonal relation
Fragmented parenthood
The splitting of parenthood into genetic, gestational, and social parenthood through reproductive-medical procedures. In the natural order, genetic, gestational, and social parenthood are united in one person (mother or father). The fragmentation contradicts the personal unity of the parent-child relationship and can lead to identity conflicts in the child (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 332 ff.).
Fragmented parenthood is a form of practical oblivion of the person. It treats the parent-child relationship as a decomposable functional complex, instead of grasping it as a personal unity. From a Thomistic-personal-ontological perspective, the parent-child relationship is one of the most fundamental basal relations between persons. The child owes its being to its parents. This relationship of origin is constitutive of the child’s personal identity.
Three reproductive-medical procedures contribute especially to fragmentation: gamete donation (egg or sperm donation) splits genetic from social parenthood. Surrogacy separates gestational from genetic and social motherhood. artificial fertilization enables and favors both forms of fragmentation by detaching conception from the personal act of the parents.
The personal-ontological critique is not directed against the affected children — their dignity is unconditional and is not diminished by their mode of coming-into-being. It is directed against the procedures themselves, which make the child the product of a technical process instead of receiving it as a gift of the personal encounter of two human beings. The embryo is a person from the very beginning. To obscure or split up its origin from its parents violates its right to knowledge of its own identity.
Ontological classification:
- Superordinate concept: practical oblivion of the person
Chapter assignment: Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person (German)
Fatherhood
Fatherhood is the personal relationship of the father to the child, which begins with conception and includes responsibility for the child’s unfolding. As a form of parenthood, fatherhood is not a merely biological fact, but an interpersonal relationship oriented toward the actualization of all three dimensions of the child’s personhood. Reproductive-medical procedures such as sperm donation can separate genetic from social fatherhood and detach conception from the personal context of marital self-giving. Fatherhood realizes itself together with motherhood in the family as the primary place of upbringing.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: parenthood
Intended parents
The person or persons who commission a surrogate mother to gestate a child for them, and who intend to assume social parenthood after the birth. Their intention alone establishes no parenthood in the ontological sense — parenthood is primarily a bodily-personal relationship that begins with conception and pregnancy, not with a contract.
No right to children
There is no “right to a child.” A child is a person with inalienable dignity — not an object of claim, not a commodity that one can order or demand. The desire for a child is humanly understandable, but it establishes no legal claim, because the child itself is a bearer of rights. Whoever treats a child as something that can be procured through money or power violates the personalist norm: the person may never be used merely as a means.
Intended parenthood shows a form of instrumentalization that extends to the child and to the surrogate mother: both are subordinated to the purposes and wishes of the intended parents. The contract replaces the bodily-personal connectedness that constitutes the essence of parenthood.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Spaemann, Robert: Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (Personal responsibility and the parent-child relationship)