The legal debate about gender and parentage has increasingly relied on empirical data from the social sciences claiming to show how children fare in different familial arrangements.

“Although the most recent studies provide support for the diversity approach and evidence from the social sciences might be valuable on a range of issues, looking to these data to resolve whether gender should matter in the law of parentage is misguided, regardless who momentarily holds the upper hand,” Appleton says.

“Studies looking at sexuality, gender performance and family characteristics are fraught with value judgments, and findings about overall well-being are often met with counter-evidence, among other problems.

“Such studies also often reflect the marginalization of nontraditional families under the prevailing legal regime, including the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage in most states,” she says.

Appleton says that parentage rules are important because of the authority and responsibility that family law invests in those individuals deemed parents and the relative lack of legal status and protection accorded to non-parents.

She discusses her support for the diversity approach to the law of parentage and the problems in constructing a legal regime based on empirical findings in “Gender and Parentage: Family Law’s Equality Project in Our Empirical Age,” a chapter in the forthcoming book, What is Parenthood?

I wonder what’s next. So far, we have drugs that contracept/abort one day after intercourse and now one week after intercourse. Will the next drug be the “month-after” pill? How about the “year-after” pill?

And at this rate, why not just sterilization?

Seriously, if some women don’t want babies this badly, perhaps they shouldn’t have them.

Ever.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro ruled July 8 that the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act discriminates against states like Massachusetts that have legalized gay “marriage.” States are permitted to define marriage as they wish, according to Tauro’s reasoning. He also ruled that DOMA violates the Equal Protection Clause, part of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

Look for more attacks on marriage this fall at the state and federal level. The folks who want gay “marriage” will not stop until they’ve achieved victory.

Obama clearly honors a “two-father family” as a “nurturing family.”

I thought that, generally speaking, women were the more nurturing sex.

Why not a three- or four-father family?

This is really getting confusing!

In what should come as no surprise, the US resumed its trend of following Europe in a declining fertility rate. A portion of “Table 1″ is provided above. From the report:

The 2008 preliminary estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR)) was 2085.5 births per 1,000 women–2% ower than the rate in 2007 (2,122.5) (Table 1). The TFR summarizes the potential impact of current fertility patterns on completed family size by estimating the average number of births that a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would have over their lifetimes, based on the age-specifi birth rates obeserved in the given year. The TFR for the United States in 2008 was below replacement after being above in 2006 and 2007. Replacement is the rate at which a given generation can exactly replace itself,k which is generally considered to be 2,1000 births per 1,00 women. The U.S. rate had been below replacement from 1972 to 2005.

Source: Hamilton BE, Martin JA, and Ventura SJ. “Births: Preliminary Data for 2008.” National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2010;58(16):1-17.

Also, from the Washington Post:

The nation’s overall birthrate fell 2 percent from 2007 to 2008, when about 4.2 million babies were born. The dip pushed the fertility rate below 2.1 per woman, meaning Americans were no longer giving birth to enough children to keep the population from declining.

Click here to access the the Tim Tebow Foundation Web site.

The new research by the Univeristy of St Andrews and Edinburgh University is the first to colate the actual decline of the “ovarian reserve” – the potential number of eggs women are born with – from conception to the menopause. It shows that on average women are born with 300,000 potential egg cells but this pool declines at a much faster rate than first thought. By the age of 30 there is only 12 per cent left on average and by the age of 40 just three per cent.

Dr Hamish Wallace, the co-author, said: “Our model shows that for 95 per cent of women, by the age of 30 years, only 12% of their maximum ovarian reserve is present, and by the age of 40 years only three per cent remains.”

Best to set aside the “it’s better to have kids after college and career” myth right away, don’t you think?

When ACP information is examined against research conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, it is evident that demographic changes in our country have been the major shaping force of our membership numbers, not outdated methodologies nor a generation gap in the leadership of our churches and institutions. . . The data show that membership and baptism figures are in large part the products of a declining birthrate among Whites [the predominate SBC population] as well as the suburbanization of America. . . A quantitative analysis will confirm what is evident by sight from comparing the two graphs: The trends for the White, non-Hispanic population in the U.S. and for the SBC’s membership pretty much share the same path.

I wonder if other denominations will be willing to make the same analysis?

From the Family Research Council’s Mapping America Project:

Children who live with both biological parents or two adoptive parents are more socially developed than those who do not.

According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, children who live with both biological parents or two adoptive parents score higher on the social development scale (50.8) than children who live within other family configurations (48.2), such as with their father only or foster parents.[3] In between are those who live with a biological parent and a stepparent (48.5) and those who live with single mothers (49.0).[4]

Positive social development is shown by behaviors such as getting along with other children, showing respect for teachers and neighbors, trying to understand other people’s feelings, and trying to resolve conflicts between people.

With Father’s Day almost upon us, expect a host of media stories on men and family life. Some will do a good job of capturing the changes and continuities associated with fatherhood in contemporary America. But other reporters and writers will generalize from their own unrepresentative networks of friends and family members, try to baptize the latest family trend, or assume that our society is heading ceaselessly in a progressive direction. So be on the lookout this week for stories, op-eds, and essays that include these five myths on contemporary fatherhood and family life.

So, it’s not true that there is a massive surge of fathers staying at home to raise the kids while mom bring homes the bacon? Click here to read the rest of the article.