LAW

Who are your parents? 👶

The legal answer to the question ‘who are your parents?’ is surprisingly confusing. Should it be based on genetics? Should it be based on who raises the child? Should the mother be the person who carries the child? It is very difficult to have one set of rules when you add surrogacy, sperm/egg donation, adoption, and stepparents into the mix. So, legally speaking, who are your parents?

💡 Things to consider

• Legal Parenthood: Legally, this is an enduring relationship of identity and basic responsibility. You cannot have more than 2 legal parents at any given time, which means multi-parent families are not legally acknowledged as parents. This creates the question of what criteria must be fulfilled for a person to be a parent. Suggestions for this criterion are usually genetics, intention, responsibility, and welfare of the child. These all have differing benefits and downsides, for instance, genetics may give certainty, but it also may not reflect the reality of the family.

  

• Motherhood and Fatherhood: The mother is the person who carries and gives birth to the child, so even surrogate mothers under s33(1) of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 (HFEA 2008) are considered the mother of the child. For fatherhood, there is a “presumption of paternity” which means the genetic father is presumed to be the legal father, and there is a presumption relating to birth certificates where an entry on a birth certificate is prima facie (at first glance) evidence of paternity. These presumptions can be rebutted under s26 of the Family Law Reform Act 1969 if the evidence (now usually a paternity test) shows that it is more probable than not that a person is/isn’t the father. Usually, under s41 and s47 HFEA 2008, sperm and egg donors are not considered parents. This allows for non-genetic parents (e.g. same-sex couples) to be considered legal parents if they consented to the treatment under s35 and s42 HFEA 2008.

  

• Parental Responsibility: This recognises the social and psychological parenting relationship, so it can encompass those without legal parenthood. Under s3(1) of the Children Act 1989 (CA 1989), this is all the rights, duties, powers, responsibilities, and authority which by law a parent has in relation to a child until they turn 18. This includes raising, protecting, and disciplining the child, etc. Mothers always have parental responsibility. Fathers have it if they are married to the mother (s2(1) CA 1989), registered on the birth certificate (s4(1)(a) CA 1989), approved by the courts through a parental responsibility order (s4(1)(c) CA 1989), etc. The law treats this as a form of status recognition, which has caused issues in relation to abusive relationships. Parental responsibility can be removed from parents who aren’t in a status relationship with the mother (i.e. unmarried), but only in the most extreme cases, e.g. where a father caused serious injuries to the child, causing a lifelong disability (Re P (Terminating Parental Responsibility) [1995] 1 FLR 1048). It cannot be removed if the father was married to the mother at the time of birth, so an abusive/dangerous father can retain parental responsibility purely to recognise their status as a father in the child’s life. This raises serious safety concerns for the family, since there is a fear that the father could use this to receive education records from their child’s school in order to find out where the family lives.

🔎 Find out more

•  Who is a legal parent and who has parental responsibility?

• Parental Rights and Responsibilites

• Issues related to parental responsibility

• Surrogacy Commission

• Callus, T. (2019) ‘What’s the point of parenthood? The agreed parenthood provisions under the HFE Act 2008 and inconsistency with intention’ Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 41

MFL

Degendering a gendered language: French ‘écriture inclusive’ ✍️

Unlike English, many languages – including French – are gendered. This means that all nouns (and other parts of language that refer to these nouns) are assigned a grammatical gender – in the case of French, masculine or feminine – even where there doesn’t appear to be any logic behind it. For inanimate nouns, this isn’t really a big deal, but when it comes to talking about people, this can be a huge problem. In French, every pronoun, every job title, every word that describes a person, has to have a gender, which has a big impact on issues to do with equality, particularly in terms of gender equality, and how non-binary people can express themselves. And this is where the écriture inclusive (inclusive writing) movement comes in, as people look for solutions to these problems.

💡 Things to consider

• Tradition vs. progress: In France, there is an age-old debate surrounding the protection of the French language in its traditional form. France has a specific institution, the Académie française, whose role is to act as a ‘guardian’ of the French language. However, as society has progressed, the Académie française has often failed to keep up. For example, historically, high offices were held by men, and thus only a masculine form of the noun denotes these roles – e.g. président, ambassadeur, premier ministre. The feminine forms – présidente, ambassadrice, première ministre – were used to denote the wife of the postholder. But, nowadays, should these words retain their original meaning, leaving female postholders to use masculine job titles, or should the language evolve to give the feminine forms an equal meaning to the masculine? Some argue that in a gendered language, the masculine can be viewed as a sort of ‘neutral default’, but is this acceptable? Can something labelled ‘masculine’ ever be truly neutral?

  

  The Guardians of the French Language … with a sword to defend it.

• Non-binary identities within a gendered language: In a language where everything is gendered, how can a non-binary person express their identity? In French, one of the main ways that people are working around this is by creating neologisms (newly invented words) that don’t have a specific gender, by combining both the masculine and feminine forms: for example, il (he) + elle (she) = iel (they, singular). Even a word such as ‘everyone’ is gendered in French (masculine: tous; feminine: toutes), so the neologism toustes has been created to incorporate both. However, is combining masculine and feminine forms – i.e. both binary forms – doing enough for non-binary people?

• Gender-neutral descriptions: Adjectives, and nouns (most importantly to this debate, job titles), are gendered, so how do we make these accessible for non-binary people, or even groups that include several genders, without resorting to a default masculine? People often joke that, in French, a group of 99 women and 1 man would still be described using masculine adjectives, but this is the reality, and many people are looking to change this. Currently, the favoured option is using the point médian (·) in the middle of a word to demarcate both forms. The word for ‘intelligent’ is intelligent in masculine and intelligente in feminine, so a non-binary person or someone following the practices of écriture inclusive (inclusive writing) could instead use intelligent·e. However, this is hard to make clear when you’re speaking aloud, and again it still relies on the binary. Are there any better solutions?

  

  That 1 man amongst 99 women

🔎 Find out more

• The Feminisation of Job Titles (in French)

• No need to ‘iel’: why France is so angry about a gender-neutral pronoun

• Gender-inclusive language in French

• An article about the Académie française authorising the feminisation of job titles

• Cerquiglini, B. et al., Femme, j’écris ton nom (1999) – in French

• A France24 news report (in English) on the debate surrounding the ‘iel’ pronoun

🍒 The cherry on top

• 🤖 Open Source AI: As the digital world develops at unprecedented rates, the need for a united approach to defining and understanding Open Source AI becomes increasingly more pressing. Listen to this episode from The Changelog podcast if you are interested in Computer Science and Programming.

• ❤️‍🩹 Wound Healing: Ever wondered how the human body heals from wounds? What are the various stages that must happen before a wound is fully healed? And what can cause this process to be impaired? If you are interested in Medicine, this YouTube video is a must-watch.

• 🗺️ Origins of the Patriarchy: Have you ever thought about how communities have been historically organised? Do we consider patriarchy to be an inevitable feature of communities? What are its origins, if they can be traced at all? This fascinating opinion piece explores just that. A great read if you are interested in History or Social Anthropology.

👀 Keep your eyes peeled for…

• 11th March - Magdalene College Cambridge Subject Taster Session (Geography)

• 11th March - UEA Film Studies Taster Lecture

• 11th March - University of London Human Rights Interactive Lecture

• 12th March - UEA English Literature Taster Lecture

• 12th March - St John’s College Cambridge Admissions Clinic

• 12th March - University of Oxford History Super-Curricular Lecture

• 13th March - UEA Geography Taster Lecture

• 13th March - UEA Research Methods Taster Lecture for Non-Mathematicians

• 13th March - UEA Computer Science Taster Lecture

• 13th March - University of London German A Level Workshop

• 13th March - Magdalene College Cambridge Subject Taster Session (Criminology)

• 13th March - University of York Open Lecture: Why History Matters to Medicine

• 13th March - Christ’s College Cambridge Applying to Cambridge for Beginners Webinar

• 14th March - Clare College Cambridge Medicine and Society Discovery Workshop

• 14th March - Balliol College Oxford Insight Into: Imaging Analysis in Neuroscience Webinar

• 14th March - Oxford Online Maths Club

• 14th March - UEA Computer Science Taster Lecture

• 14th March - UEA French Taster Lecture

• 14th March - UEA Philosophy Taster Lecture

• 15th March - Balliol College Oxford Discovery Programme

• 16th March - Applying to Competitive UK Universities Undergraduate Event in Chandigarh, India

🗳️ Poll