ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way in which legal discourse has privileged some relationships and recognized these as 'familial', thereby creating attendant legal responsibilities, whilst simultaneously excluding other relationships from legal recognition. It outlines the potential parents in law under the provisions of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (HFEA) 2008 and associated legislation in order to consider which relationships have now become imaginable in law, and therefore recognized as such, whilst tracing the contours of those relationships that lie beyond the legal imagination outside its image of parents, family and responsibility. However, in order to illustrate the significance of these legislative changes it is important to consider briefly the legal landscape in this field prior to the enactment of its provisions. This analysis has traced the inconsistencies and limitations of the legal imagination regarding potential parents and the concurrent ascription of responsibility, demonstrating that some previously unimaginable parents in law have now become possible under the HFEA 2008.
