Considers the current state of parenting in the United States and offers a new definition of family and a new approach to family law.

Photographs and brief text introduce general concepts of human reproduction. A separate text for adults provides more specific detail and suggestions for discussing the subject with children.

Thanks to new reproductive technologies and new ways of forming families, the world of parenting is opening up as never before. What defines a legal family? Should there be any restrictions on buying and selling eggs and sperm, or hiring "surrogate mothers"? How many parents can a child have? While there's no going back to the traditional family, Mary Lyndon Shanley shows us that we don't have to live in moral chaos. She offers a new vision of family law that puts each child's right to be cared for at its center, while also taking into account the complex needs of every family member.

What lengths would you go to have a baby? This work describes at times devastating social, emotional, spiritual and physical impact of infertility on the author and her husband, including feelings of bereavement and inadequacy as well as financial pressure.

MAKING PLANS, MAKING FRIENDS…MAKING A BABY? Elaine Lowry is a divorcée with a plan: to have a baby on her own. Why shouldn’t she have the child she always dreamed of—the child her ex-husband is now having with his new wife! As if it’s not enough that he’s taken the house and, with it, her social standing. Enter sinfully handsome lawyer-for-the-opposing side Mitch Ryder. Feeling guilty about the part he played in Elaine’s divorce, he takes over as landlord on her apartment before it’s sold right from under her. Mitch offers himself as a daddy candidate on one condition: their marriage needs to be all business. But Mitch can’t help the tender protective feelings he has for Elaine, especially when they make love for the first time. And besides, who says business comes before pleasure?

Although the infant has been a consistent figure in literature (and, for many people, a significant figure in personal life), there’s been little attention focused on infants, or on their place in Canadian fiction, until now. In this book, Sandra Sabatini examines Canadian fiction to trace the ideological charge behind the represented infant. Examining writers from L.M. Montgomery and Frederick Philip Grove to Thomas King and Terry Griggs, Sabatini compares women’s writing about babies with the way infants appear in texts by men over the course of a century. She discovers a range of changing attitudes toward babies. After being seen as a source of financial burden, social shame, or sentimental fantasy, infants have increasingly become a source of value and meaning. The book challenges the perception of babies as passive objects of care and argues for a reading of the infant as a subject in itself. It also reflects upon how the representations of infancy in Canadian literature offer an intriguing portrait of how we imagine ourselves.

The development of new reproductive technologies has raised urgent questions and debates about how and by whom these treatments should be controlled. On the one hand individuals and groups have claimed access to assisted reproduction as a right, and some have also claimed that this access should be available free of charge. As well as clinically infertile heterosexual couples, this right has been claimed by single women, gay couples, post-menopausal women, and couples who wish to delay having children for various reasons. Others have argued that a desire to have children does not make it a human right, and, moreover, that there are some people who should not be assisted to become parents, on grounds of age, sexuality, or lifestyle. Mary Warnock steers a clear path through the web of complex issues underlying these views. She begins by analysing what it means to claim something as a 'right', and goes on to discuss the cases of different groups of people. She also examines the ethical problems faced by particular types of assisted reproduction, including artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, and surrogacy, and argues that in the future human cloning may well be a viable and acceptable form of treatment for some types of infertility.