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Who is parenthood for – adults? Or children? ~ New Study Asks

By Hilary White

CHICAGO, September 28, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The homosexual revolution has swept through legal systems  around the world and shows no sign of slowing. The Chicago-based scholar Elizabeth Marquart has published a report that examines the effects on children of the “new family” as envisioned by the social re-engineers of the pan-sexual revolution.

Titled, “The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs,” the report discusses the effects of the newly renovated laws entitling homosexual partners not only to call themselves “married” but increasingly to adopt children and mimic natural families.

Marquart’s report, jointly sponsored by the Institute for American Values, the Institute for the Study of Marriage, Law, and Culture and the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, centred around the question, “Who is parenthood for – adults? Or children?”

The 44-page report points to this new legal paradigm in combination with the incredibly rapid advance of artificial means of procreation. In many of the countries offering IVF, these fertility treatments are accompanied by legislation abolishing any restrictions based on the marital status of clients.

All of these changes have set the stage, according to Marquart, for a global inversion of the meaning of parenthood from being about the rights and protection of children to being about allowing parents to have whatever they want.

In Canada, Bill C-38, the legislation passed last year that redefined legal marriage,  includes a provision to erase the term "natural parent" and replace it across the board with "legal parent" in federal law. Marquart spoke at a conference on the family in Ottawa, where she said that this shift has placed the definition of the family in the hands of the state, rather than resting as it previously did, in the civil society that gave rise to the state.

Marquart examines decisions and laws that propose to give “parental rights” to three or more “parents” of children conceived by IVF or sperm donation, cases in which homosexual partners are granted third-party parental rights and court decisions in the US that have recognized the concept of “psychological” parenthood.

Marquart cites these as part of the growing evidence in legislation and court decisions around the world that adults' desires are taking precedence over children's needs and rights.

The National Post’s Barbara Kay writes of the report that Marquart’s interviewees – children of these ‘alternate’ family structures –  have adopted various disparaging terms for their own identities.

Kay writes, “Some subjects call themselves ‘lopsided" or ‘half-adopted’ or, in cases of lesbian unions, ‘queer spawn.’ One used the term ‘kinship slaves.’” Marquart quotes Joanna Rose, an Australian interviewee, saying, “I believe that the pain of infertility should not be appeased at the expense of the next generation.”

Apart from fulfilling the wildest dreams of homosexual and feminist lobbyists, as well as boosting sales for private IVF clinics, no one has yet seriously examined what the long-term effects might be for children born into the new global family paradigm or for the society that accepst it.

The report asks the qustions, “Do mothers and fathers matter to children? Is there anything special—anything worth supporting—about the two-person, mother-father model? Are children commodities to be produced by the marketplace? What role should the state have in defining parenthood? When adult rights clash with children’s needs, how should the conflict be resolved?”

“The choice is ours,” Marquart writes. “At stake are the most elemental features of children’s well-being—their social and physical health and their moral and spiritual wholeness.”

Read the report,
“The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs” (Free registration and Adobe Acrobat Reader required.)
http://www.marriagedebate.com/reg/login.php

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Even “Good” Divorce Hard on Kids, New Study Confirms
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/nov/05110907.html

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