PROTECTING CHILDREN BY PRESERVING PARENTHOOD

Much has been written about the appropriate legal standards in cases involving competing claims of parenthood.3 In these "competing claims" cases, courts or legislatures are called upon to confer rights and responsibilities among two or more adults seeking to assume the emotional, financial, and care-taking role in a child's life.4 Some of these cases involve garden-variety adultery in which a father discovers he is not the biological father of a child born during his marriage to the child' s mother.5 Increasingly, however, competing claims cases involve parental relationships created from artificial reproductive technology (ART), or adoption, or both.6 These cases occur in a variety of family structures: families with heterosexual married parents, same sex couples, and single parents.