Is Assisted Procreation an LGBT Right?

Authors

Michael Boucai, University at Buffalo School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Rights

Abstract

A movement long identified with the notion that “love makes a family” today flirts dangerously with the dogma that “blood is thicker than water.” Biogeneticism, an ideology that favors biological modes of kinship and genetic conceptions of identity, informs many LGBT individuals’ choices about why and how to have children. In turn this ideology marks two troubling features of political efforts to facilitate LGBT parenthood: first, the markedly different understandings of equality — full versus formal, lived versus legal — that guide movement approaches to assisted procreation and adoption, respectively; and second, invocations of a fundamental “right to procreate” that valorize reproduction, idealize a biological model of parenthood, and threaten to entrench biogenetic bias in family law and constitutional doctrine.

Publication Title

Wisconsin Law Review

First Page

1065

Last Page

1126

Comments

Copyright 2016 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System; Reprinted by permission of the Wisconsin Law Review.