Kolinsky: "Fundamental Rights and Fair Fights: Holding Out for Legal Parent Recognition Under State Multiparent Recognition Statutes"

Heather M. Kolinsky (University of Florida Levin College of Law) has recently posted to SSRN her paper, Fundamental Rights and Fair Fights: Holding Out for Legal Parent Recognition Under State Multiparent Recognition Statutes.  Here is the abstract:

This Article considers the impact of the behavioral proxy of holding out to establish legal parenthood, and how that proxy functions in new statutory frameworks designed to recognize more than two legal parents for a child.  Holding out was originally conceived as a mechanism to allow unmarried biological fathers to seek legal parent status.  Holding out has been extended to intended and intentional parents in surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology as well as to married and unmarried same sex partners.  In these iterations holding out has facilitated legal parent recognition as the modern family form has evolved to include more than the traditional marital dyad. However, holding out may not map as easily onto newer statutory forms of legal parent recognition. 

Some states have enacted statutes that allow recognition of more than two legal parents for a child at any one time, opening the door to recognition of more parental caregiving relationships outside the legal parent binary. The reality is that recognizing those parental caregiving relationships is often a fraught exercise in navigating a system that remains fundamentally structured to recognize no more than two legal parents to whom the state assigns rights and responsibilities.  That tension is heightened when a petitioner is biologically related to a child, versus an unrelated caregiver, as societal presumptions of performative care required of kin may inhibit recognition of some groups of third legal parents as compared to others.