Who Is a Parent

This short essay, published as the opening piece in an issue of the ABA Family Advocate devoted to child custody, addresses parentage. It details the various paths to parental recognition across U.S. jurisdictions: adoption, presumed parentage, biological/genetic parentage, intended parentage (in the context of assisted reproduction), and functional (or de facto) parentage. By explaining how each path to parentage operates with examples from state law, this essay reveals important trends in the American legal system. Increasingly, states have accommodated changing family patterns and have recognized parents even when they break from the conventional norms of the biological, marital, and heterosexual family.