ABSTRACT
Because parents possess a bundle of important rights and duties, clear and unambiguous legal definitions of motherhood and fatherhood are self-evidently desirable. And yet the law has tended to assume that the existence of a parentchild link will simply be obvious. Whilst this may be true in the paradigm case of a child conceived through sexual intercourse and brought up by both her genetic progenitors, for an increasing number of children there may be genuine uncertainty about the identity of their parents. Reproductive technologies, as is commonly observed, have the potential to fragment our definitions of motherhood and fatherhood. Science, according to John Lawrence Hill, has ‘distilled the various phases of procreation – coitus, conception and gestation – into their component parts, wreaking havoc on our prevailing conceptions of parenthood’.1
