School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia.
Sydney Health Ethics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Monash Bioeth Rev. 2024 Jun;42(1):87-98. doi: 10.1007/s40592-024-00198-y. Epub 2024 Jul 11.
Stimulated by development of reproductive technologies, many current bioethical accounts of parenthood focus on defining parenthood at or around birth. They tend to exclude from their scope some parent-child relationships that develop later in a child's life. In reality, a parent-child relationship can emerge or dissolve over time: the parents of person A as an adolescent or adult may be different to her parents when she is a young child. To address this aspect of parenthood, we propose a new 'mutuality account' of parenthood, grounded in the concept of ontological security. We argue that in most cases a parent-child relationship exists if there is mutual ontological security between the parent and child. We suggest that this mutual ontological security is constituted and sustained by shared frameworks of reality and cohesive personal narratives. Our intention is to broaden the conceptual understanding of parenthood, to include parent-child relationships that do not fall neatly into current bioethical accounts, and to argue against the notion that objective physiological, causal, or social ties are necessary to 'make' a parent.
受生殖技术发展的刺激，许多当前的生育伦理账户关注的是在出生时或围绕出生时定义生育。它们往往将一些在孩子生命后期发展的亲子关系排除在其范围之外。实际上，亲子关系可以随着时间的推移而出现或消失：一个青少年或成年时期的人的父母可能与她小时候的父母不同。为了解决生育的这一方面，我们提出了一种新的生育“相互关系论”，其基础是本体论安全的概念。我们认为，如果父母和孩子之间存在相互本体论安全，那么就存在亲子关系。我们建议，这种相互本体论安全是由共同的现实框架和凝聚力的个人叙述构成和维持的。我们的目的是扩大对生育的概念理解，将不属于当前生育伦理账户的亲子关系包括在内，并反对认为客观的生理、因果或社会联系是“制造”父母所必需的观点。
