ABSTRACT
Many of the concerns of family policy over reproduction focus on the Issue of fitness for parenthood. In this chapter, we review concerns over cohabitation, and whether this means a decline in the stability and commitment which families can provide. Much of the debate over cohabitation is fuelled by concern over the decline of marriage, and anxiety reaches fever pitch with relation to extra-marital births, particularly to teenage mothers. This is not conducive to a cool appraisal of the available evidence on either cohabitation or extra-marital births. The focus on the problems associated with the decline in the traditional family tend to obscure questions of need (for example, in relation to contraception for teenagers) and of rights (notably of cohabiting couples). The issue of rights is especially vexed in relation to adoption, where the rights of children, adoptive parents and natural parents may be hard to reconcile. New reproductive technologies have posed a further set of challenges to assumptions about fitness for parenting, most obviously in relation to the rights of same-sex couples to reproduce through IVE. Obsessed with concerns over marriage and the traditional family, family policy has barely begun to confront the choices arising from social and technological change.
