Chuck colson’s Center just published an article of mine by that title.
We’ll have the whole thing up soon, I’m sure. In the meantime, here is a snippet. And don’t forget to visit the Colson Center for more cool info.
As a woman who has given birth to a child, who has been an adoptive mother, and who has been a foster mother, I think I know what I’m talking about here. It really wouldn’t have been good for our son for us to share parental rights with his birth mother in Romania. And we actually did kind of share parental rights with the birth parents and the social workers when we were foster parents. The birth parents did not have custody of their children, but they still had the right to see their children.
We had to take care of the kids on a daily basis, even though we didn’t have parental rights. We got to listen to parents second-guessing our parenting decisions, even parents who were making supervised phone calls from jail. It was a big deal for me to obtain temporary rights to make education decisions. The social workers had the final say so about health care and other things, even though the social workers didn’t have day to day contact with the children. Sharing parental rights is a mess really, something to be done only in dire circumstances, not something to be made normal or routine.But the legal system is changing the very idea of motherhood, at the urging of the Sex Law Radicals. This is only in part due to the desires for same sex couples to have children. A whole variety of people would like parental rights, without making commitments to the child’s other natural parent. So motherhood and fatherhood must be redefined to accommodate these adult desires.
