ABSTRACT
The right to parent a child is typically taken to include certain rights of authority and influence, including the right to rear the child and to shape the course of the child's education. The licensing of potential non-family member adoptive parents declares that they have been found competent to act as parents. The claim that the experience of pregnancy provides an important opportunity for education and preparation for parenthood, precluding the need for formal licensing, is in part an empirical claim and in part a normative claim. The experience of pregnancy, which affords a period of intensive parental preparation and education along with continuity of care and responsibility for the child, is a legitimate defense against the demand for formal screening and licensing of all birth parents. Pregnancy provides a unique and usually helpful introduction to parenting, and there must be a very strong reason indeed to deprive a woman of a child whom she has gestated as a fetus.
