Academic

News in Brief?European High Court on Lesbian Adoption

By Julie Shapiro

This week the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the regional authorities in France acted improperly when they refused to allow a single lesbian to adopt a child. (That first link is to the actual opinion of the court, but here is one to a much briefer news account.)

While France allows single women to adopt, it had denied the request of this particular woman, who just happened to be a lesbian. France contended that the denial had not be because she was a lesbian, but rather because of the lack of a”paternal referent.” In other words, the problem was there would not be a father.

I won’t discuss the opinion in any detail. It’s rather long and complicated. But consider the rationale advanced by the state. Not only is parenting gendered, but that is a good and necessary thing. In the view of the French authorities (and they are hardly alone in this) a male parent and a female parent do different things and you need to have one of each in order to properly raise a child. It isn’t simply an assertion that two parents are better than one or that a stable couple is better able to raise children than is a single parent. It is the specific genders of the parental figures that matter.

I highlight this for two reasons. First, it’s further evidence that parenthood is deeply gendered. (I talked about this earlier, though I don’t think that proposition was terribly controversial.) Second, some people are deeply invested in the gendered nature of parenting as a political matter. Their position isn’t simply that parenthood is gendered, but more importantly, that it should be gendered. There’s a world of difference between describing what is and asserting that it should be that way.

The article also makes clear that the ideological commitment to gendered parenthood is a critical concern for lesbians and gay men particularly. Indeed, as the focus of conservative action against lesbians and gay men has expanded from anti-marriage to anti-parenting, arguments about appropriate gender roles and parenting have moved more to the fore.

-Julie Shapiro (cross-posted at Related Topics)

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on January 23, 2008 (boomark / email).