Beyond conception: legal determinations of filiation in the context of assisted reproductive technologies

This article argues that legal determinations of filiation are normative ideological constructions about how societal relations between parents and children should be ordered. They are based upon regular understandings of the relationship between biological and social facts and, as this article demonstrates, operate to create an asymmetrical relationship between the categories between paternity and maternity. I suggest that fairly recent developments in reproductive and genetic filiation have been made and offer the potential for an expanded understanding of relatedness or kinship which does not take the two-parent--one of each sex--model of the family as its normative form. While the examples I draw on arise in the context of reproductive technologies, I suggest that the analysis has broader implications for the recognition of broader family forms and relationship.