In recent years much attention has been paid to the equal treatment of same-sex couples in the Netherlands. This led to the introduction of registered partnerships in 1998 and culminated in the opening of marriage to same-sex couples on 1 April 2001. But what of the children being raised or growing up in these registered partnerships and marriages? How much attention has been paid to their rights to equal treatment? Since 1998 the Dutch government has taken a number of measures to give more legal protection to same-sex families and their children. However, the regulations introduced for this purpose turn out to be rather incoherent and do not yet guarantee full equality, in particular for the children concerned. This article discusses the problems that may occur in practice and suggests possible solutions in the context of a specific case that recently came before the Dutch courts which concerned a lesbian couple who had met a man willing to donate his sperm, on the condition that he could be involved in the child's life in the background and be known as the child's father. The dispute centred on the question of which two of these three adults were entitled to become the legal parents of the child.

Planned parenthood within the international lesbian and gay communities has attracted considerable attention and controversy in the past decade. On 5 April 2002, Guest J of the Family Court of Australia acknowledged a lesbian couple as resident parents of 2-year-old 'Patrick'. This judgement was remarkable in that it signalled a break with the well-documented international legal non-recognition of lesbian non-biological parents. However, the judgement was actually a loss for the two women, who had initiated legal proceedings in a bid to have the biological father's contact visits with the child reduced. Contrary to their wishes, the biological father was awarded increased contact and a notion of 'father' was separated in law from 'parent.' In this article, via analysis of the judgement, several issues are examined. First, one dilemma Guest J was faced with was: are the best interests of a child in a lesbian-parented family served by recognizing a father as a means for a child to make sense of his biological origins, or, by allowing the child to form and maintain a 'father-like' social relationship? This dilemma made visible the somewhat arbitrary and subjective nature of the 'best interests' standard when it comes to deciding between characterizations of paternity that recognize the symbolism of biological connections versus those that recognize the blood tie as grounds for a regular paternal social relationship. In the absence of an obvious 'best interests' conclusion, the judge found himself in the difficult position of assessing both the original terms or intent of the parental agreement between the parties and the quality of the existing social relationship between biological father and child. It is argued that his assessment of both issues was, at times, coloured by an unsubstantiated assumption that the lesbian parents' concept of kinship was irrational. The 'Patrick' case also indicated the extent to which lesbians and gay men may have entirely different expectations and understandings of 'known donor' relationships. This finding is contextualized within broader historical and political developments within lesbian and gay cultures. The author's conclusion is that there is a pressing need for legislative, policy and community-based initiatives to guide and assist individuals who identify with these communities in the task of bringing children into the world.

This article challenges the distinction the law draws between male and female. It focuses on the legal and medical treatment of intersexual people. Analysing the nature and rate of intersexuality it argues that there is a significant number of people who cannot be described as either male or female and instead exhibit a range of sexual characteristics. Until recently the law and medicine have insisted that intersexual people should be categorized as either male or female. Surgery was performed to ensure that they had the appearance assumed to be the 'norm' for a man or woman and the law followed this medical assignment of sex. Over the last couple of years the established medical practice and the legal treatment have been challenged. This article discusses the nature of these challenges and argues that there is a strong case for rejecting the traditional legal and medical approach to intersexual people. Cosmetic surgery on intersexual babies should be delayed until the individual is old enough to be able to choose their own sexual identity, which may be neither male nor female. The insistence that every person must either be male or female is no longer supportable in medical or social terms and a much wider range of sexual identities must be recognized by the law.

On 1 April 2002 the Dutch Bill 'Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act' (Wet toetsing levensbeeindiging op verzoek en hulp bij zelfdoding) came into force. This article starts with an outline of the former legal position in The Netherlands regarding euthanasia and medically assisted suicide, followed by an explanation of the new Act. The main focus of this contribution lays on the requirements of due care, the obligation to notify euthanasia to the coroner and the revised legal position of the so-called Regional Review Commissions. Furthermore, the article considers the termination of life in the case of minors and the function and requirements of written statements of euthanasia by patients no longer capable of communication. Finally, the article gives an overview of the problems [that] may come in the future concerning the approach to euthanasia in The Netherlands.

The advent of genetics and genetic testing has given rise to unique problems for the family. The discovery of a predisposition to a genetic condition in one individual also reveals information about the genetic make-up and potential risks of family members. There is, therefore, potential for conflict over access to and control of such information. Traditionally the duty of confidentiality owed by a health care professional to a patient has provided an appropriate means by which personal health information has been kept secured. It is not clear, however, that the problems which surrounds genetic information in the familial milieu can be adequately dealt with using confidentiality. This article examines these problems and argues for the value of an appeal to the concept of privacy in seeking to resolve some of the more intractable issues.

The research presented below analyses the rhetoric of abortion jurisprudence from the perspective of fundamental principles of feminist theory. While focused primarily on the American experience, it addresses and raises questions that are on the political agenda in a significant number of contemporary societies. The feminist principles identified, and against which judicial rhetoric is assessed, include: the importance of actual life experience over abstract principles, the significance of the distinction between the public and private realms and the understanding of society as a web of relationships. Demonstrated by the relevant data is that the decisions of the judiciary restrictive of reproductive choice are characterized by a distinctly non-feminist rhetoric.

In this paper I discuss whether or not biographical information concerning the sperm donor should be disclosed to children conceived through donor insemination. Policies of disclosure for example in the context of adoption, have been justified on the basis of a notion of identity which emphasizes genetic ties. This notion of identity and the policies of disclosure of information concerning biological parents based on it, have been criticized by many writers, including feminists, as reinforcing explanations of human organization and development based on biological determinism rather than on ideas such as social construction. Further, this notion of identity is seen to emphasize the importance of genetic parenthood over the commitment involved in bringing up a child as a social parent. While agreeing with these criticisms of that particular notion of identity, I argue that the notion of identity as a whole should not be summarily rejected. Rather, it should be re-interpreted using a sociological approach incorporating the notion of narrative. This second narrative notion of identity is developed with reference to the situation of some groups of children, who like those born from donor insemination, generally do not have any knowledge of their biological parent[s], for example adoptees, the children of the disappeared in Argentina and child migrants. In this paper, policies of disclosure which allow these children to gain some knowledge of their biological parents are discussed in light of the two notions of identity. It is argued that disclosure may be justified on the basis of a narrative notion of identity. This allows for the rigid dichotomy created between biological determinism and social construction: the importance of social parents to the child is emphasized, however the desire a child may have to know something about her or his biological parent is not denied or dismissed.