The Unmaking of the Child: Rights Without Nature
The Ontology of Parenthood and the Eclipse of Natural Law
The debate over surrogacy and adoption in the modern West is frequently conducted in the language of compassion, inclusion, and equality. Yet such terms, however rhetorically powerful, often obscure the deeper philosophical and theological questions at stake. What is parenthood? Is it something one constructs through intention and recognition, or something one receives through participation in a natural and divinely ordered reality? Until this question is addressed, the surrounding arguments remain suspended in ambiguity.
To speak clearly, two distinctions must be maintained. To reason teleologically is to consider purpose—what something is for, the end toward which it is ordered. To reason ontologically is to consider being—what something is in itself, its essential nature. The former concerns fulfilment; the latter concerns identity. When these are separated, confusion inevitably follows, for one begins to treat functions as if they could redefine essence.
The perennial Christian tradition, drawing upon Sacred Scripture and the philosophical clarity of Thomas Aquinas, understands parenthood as neither a social construct nor a mere legal status, but as a real participation in the order of creation. The union of man and woman is not arbitrary; it is intrinsically ordered toward the generation of new life. This teleological orientation is not imposed from without but arises from the very nature of the human person. Consequently, fatherhood and motherhood are not interchangeable roles but ontological realities—distinct relations grounded in the complementary difference of the sexes.
When this unity is severed—whether by technological intervention or juridical redefinition—parenthood becomes fragmented. Genetic, gestational, and social dimensions are separated and reassigned, often through contractual mechanisms. The child, in such arrangements, risks being regarded less as a gift received and more as an outcome produced. The language of “family formation” subtly replaces the older language of generation, signalling a shift from nature to construction.
It is at this point that a more profound transformation becomes visible: the displacement of natural law by the ascendancy of rights-based reasoning. Where once moral and legal claims were grounded in the nature and ends of the human person, they are now increasingly framed in terms of autonomy, equality, and non-discrimination. Rights, once understood as flowing from what man is, are now frequently asserted on the basis of what man wills. In this sense, rights no longer merely recognise reality; they increasingly function to redefine it.
The legal developments in the United Kingdom offer a concrete illustration. The consolidation of equality legislation in the Equality Act 2010 established non-discrimination as a governing principle in the provision of public services. Religious exemptions were narrowly construed, largely confined to internal ecclesial matters. Adoption agencies, by contrast, were classified as providers of a public good and thus subject to the full force of equality provisions.
The case of Catholic Care (Diocese of Leeds) is emblematic. Seeking to maintain a placement policy consistent with Catholic teaching—namely, that children should be placed with a mother and a father—the agency argued for an exemption on the grounds of religious identity. The courts acknowledged the sincerity of the belief but concluded that its application constituted unlawful discrimination. Applying the standard test of proportionality under the European Convention on Human Rights, the judiciary held that while the restriction pursued a religious good, it was not justified in light of the legitimate aim of ensuring equal access to adoption services. In effect, the limitation on religious freedom was deemed proportionate to the aim of preventing discrimination. In parallel, the requirements of charity law—especially the demonstration of “public benefit”—were interpreted in such a way that restricting placements was said to undermine the welfare of children by narrowing the pool of prospective adopters.¹
This policy orientation is reflected in the state’s own rationale. Government guidance and ministerial statements have consistently emphasised the need to widen the pool of adopters in order to secure placements more efficiently, prioritising access and non-discrimination over any particular model of family structure.² The question is thus framed administratively: how to maximise placements within an equality framework, rather than how to preserve a normative understanding of the family.
Yet this shift sits in a certain tension with the principles articulated in international human rights instruments themselves. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society” and is entitled to protection by society and the State (Art. 16.3). It further recognises the prior rights of parents in relation to the upbringing and education of their children (Art. 26.3). Likewise, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child affirms, so far as possible, the right of the child “to know and be cared for by his or her parents” (Art. 7), and obliges States to respect the child’s identity, including family relations (Art. 8). These provisions do not resolve contemporary disputes, but they preserve a conceptual link between the child, his origin, and the family as a natural reality rather than a purely constructed one.
The consequence of the domestic legal shift was not a direct prohibition of Catholic adoption agencies, but the imposition of conditions under which their traditional model could not operate. Most closed, secularised, or redirected their work. The outcome is revealing: not because it represents an isolated legal dispute, but because it exposes the deeper shift in moral reasoning. The operative question was no longer, “What does the nature of the child require?” but rather, “What arrangements can be justified without infringing the equal claims of adults?”
Here the contrast must be drawn without ambiguity. The child is not an entitlement; he is a person. His dignity does not arise from the desires projected upon him but from what he is. To ask what is owed to the child is therefore to ask an ontological question before it is a legal one. If the child is by nature the fruit of a father and a mother, then that relational origin is not incidental but constitutive. The rights of adults, however sincerely asserted, cannot erase this prior reality without consequence.
This conclusion is not merely speculative; it finds indirect confirmation in the empirical literature on identity and origin. Across adoption studies and research into donor-conceived persons, there is consistent evidence of what has been termed “genealogical consciousness”—a persistent human orientation toward biological origins. Individuals separated from one or both biological parents frequently seek to understand their lineage and situate themselves within a coherent narrative of origin.³ This has led to the abandonment of donor anonymity in the United Kingdom and the development of open adoption practices, acknowledging that the obscuring of origin generates enduring questions of identity.
The significance of this evidence must be precisely stated. It does not demonstrate universal harm, nor does it negate the possibility of flourishing in non-traditional arrangements. It demonstrates something more fundamental: that human beings do not regard their origins as incidental. They seek them. They interpret themselves through them. Identity, in this sense, is not merely constructed—it is, at least in part, received.⁴
This distinction is decisive. Modern frameworks evaluate outcomes in terms of behaviour, stability, and wellbeing. These are necessary measures, but they are not exhaustive. They do not address what a person is in relation to his origin. They do not answer whether identity can be fully detached from the reality of generation without remainder.
From a theological perspective, the answer is clear. The human person is not an abstract individual but a being-in-relation—created, begotten, and situated within a lineage that precedes his own self-awareness. The maternal and paternal are not interchangeable functions but distinct realities, each reflecting aspects of the created order. To remove or redefine them is not simply to adjust a social arrangement; it is to alter the symbolic and relational structure within which identity is formed.
The implications of this shift extend beyond individual cases to the fabric of society itself. When law ceases to recognise pre-existing realities and instead assumes the role of defining them, it introduces a new form of instability. Categories once grounded in nature become administratively contingent. Parenthood, identity, and family structure are no longer received but assigned, and therefore subject to revision as social consensus evolves.⁵
In this framework, the family is no longer understood as a natural society arising from generation, but as a configurable unit of care. Its defining feature becomes function rather than form. While the goods of care, stability, and affection remain indispensable, the loss of a normative structure weakens the sense that the family embodies a reality that ought to be preserved rather than adapted.
At the same time, identity becomes increasingly self-referential. Detached from origin, it must be constructed through narrative and recognition. This places a greater burden upon the individual to establish coherence where it was once given, and risks severing the continuity between generations upon which social stability depends.⁶ Society itself becomes less an inheritance and more a project, less something received and handed on than something continuously reconstructed.
Most significantly, the moral centre of gravity shifts. In a rights-dominant framework, the claims most readily recognised are those of adults, who possess agency, voice, and legal standing. The child’s interests, mediated through others, risk being subordinated. Where rights are framed primarily in terms of adult autonomy, the child is repositioned—from subject to object, from one whose nature sets limits to one around whom arrangements are made.⁷
This shift has implications not only for the identity of the child, but for the stability of parental obligation itself. When parenthood is no longer understood as an ontological relation arising from generation, but as a role defined in legal and functional terms, the permanence of that obligation is subtly altered. It remains binding in law, yet becomes increasingly intelligible as something that can be transferred, reassigned, or mediated by the State. Adoption, surrogacy, and state intervention in care arrangements all demonstrate this capacity for reassignment. The danger is not that responsibility disappears, but that it is reconceived—not as an enduring duty grounded in what the parent is, but as a function sustained so long as it is effectively performed.⁸
This is not to deny the reality of brokenness. The Church has always recognised that circumstances may fall short of the ideal, and she has consistently called for charity toward those who suffer such deficiencies. But there is a decisive difference between responding to a lack and institutionalising it. To accommodate tragedy is an act of mercy; to redefine nature is an act of will.
The Magisterium has addressed these matters with clarity in documents such as Donum Vitae (1987) and Dignitas Personae (2008), both of which reaffirm the inseparable connection between the unitive and procreative dimensions of marriage. To separate these is to risk reducing the human person to the object of technique. Moreover, practices such as surrogacy introduce further moral concerns, including the commodification of the body and the potential exploitation of the vulnerable—particularly women whose economic circumstances render them susceptible to such arrangements.
What emerges, then, is not merely a dispute over policy but a contest between two anthropologies. One views nature as normative, a given order to be understood and respected. The other views nature as malleable, a substrate to be shaped by human intention. In the former, freedom consists in aligning oneself with reality; in the latter, freedom consists in overcoming it.
For when rights cease to recognise the truth of what man is, they do not liberate him—they unmake him. Freedom, severed from reality, becomes not the perfection of the human person but its distortion: a power to redefine what ought instead to be received. What was once understood as the recognition of a moral order becomes an assertion of will against that order, and in that inversion, law itself loses its anchor in truth.
In such a framework, relationships that were once grounded in nature are recast as arrangements of preference. Fatherhood and motherhood are reduced from realities into roles; origin becomes incidental; generation becomes production. The language of rights, untethered from ontology, no longer protects the person as he is, but reshapes him according to what others desire him to be. And because the adult possesses voice, agency, and legal standing, it is his claim that prevails.
Yet the child has no such power. He does not assert; he receives. He does not define his origin; he is defined by it. When that origin is obscured, fragmented, or deliberately reconfigured, he inherits not only a new social arrangement, but a question placed at the very centre of his identity: from whom do I come? This question cannot be legislated away, nor answered by sentiment. It arises from the structure of the human person itself.
Thus the cost of this redefinition is not borne equally. It falls most heavily upon the one who cannot negotiate its terms. For the child is not consulted in the construction of the system that shapes him; he enters into it already determined by decisions made in the name of rights. And where those rights have ceased to recognise the truth of his being—his origin, his relational nature, his place within the order of generation—they do not secure his freedom. They place upon him the burden of a loss he did not choose, and cannot fully remedy.
For it is one thing to suffer the absence of what ought to be; it is another to have that absence declared irrelevant. The former calls forth compassion and restoration. The latter redefines deprivation as neutrality. And in that redefinition, something essential is not only denied, but forgotten.
¹ Catholic Care (Diocese of Leeds) v Charity Commission for England and Wales [2012] UKUT 395 (TCC), §§99–103; European Convention on Human Rights, Arts. 9, 14.
² UK Department for Education, Adoption Strategy: Achieving Excellence Everywhere (2016); Department for Education policy statements on widening the adopter pool and reducing placement delay.
³ David M. Brodzinsky et al., Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self (1992); Harold D. Grotevant (2009); Eric Blyth & Lucy Frith (2009).
⁴ Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968).
⁵ John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980).
⁶ Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981).
⁷ United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Arts. 3, 7–8.
⁸ See e.g. Children Act 1989 (UK), provisions on parental responsibility, care orders, and adoption; illustrating legal reassignment and state mediation of parental roles.
⁹ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 91–94.
¹⁰ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.1.
¹¹ Holy Bible, Genesis 1–2.
¹² Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2201–2203.
¹³ Equality Act 2010.
¹⁴ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arts. 16, 26.
¹⁵ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae (1987).
¹⁶ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Personae (2008).
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