Changing the Meaning of "Parent"

Abstract

This article was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared in The Wanderer in 2022. It concerns the changing meaning of “parent” in American law, driven in part by the Uniform Parentage Act (which is a model law promoted by leading lawyers and legal scholars in the family law field). The law is moving in the direction of extending parental rights over children to others besides their natural or adoptive parents, allowing homosexual couples to adopt (irrespective of the adverse effects this has on children), and to increasingly see “multiparent families” as the norm. This article is reprinted with permission.