MOST people assume that if you create a child, it is your child. But the links between creation, commission and child-rearing are growing more tenuous as reproductive technology advances and laws are reformed in response. In the coming decades, we might see the first children conceived using synthetic eggs and sperm and “born” through ectogenesis (artificial womb technology). How we respond to these advances will depend on what we do, between now and then, with the relationship between procreation and parenthood.
Since 2017, law reform bodies in England, Scotland and Wales have been refining proposals for a reform of …