When a Single Man Wants to Be a Father: Revealing the Invisible Subjects in the Law Regulating Fertility Treatment

Abstract

This article takes the example of single men who wish to become single fathers, using surrogacy, as a case study to examine the nature of legal subjectivity and the process by which persons acquire social visibility through legal mechanisms. The article investigates the notion of the absent subjects in law and examines the ways in which single men have been rendered invisible in the area of assisted reproduction. It investigates the emergence of legal subjectivity through the acquisition of rights in the context of fertility treatment. In this respect, it analyses the recent jurisprudence of the English courts and the changes in the human rights law that helped construct single men as subjects of law. The article proposes the concept of (in)visibilization for a number of reasons. It allows us to observe and examine the slow and contingent emergence of legal subjectivity in law. It illuminates ways, in which aspects of the critique of human rights as an inadequate vehicle of social inclusion can be overcome. In both respects, the concept of (in)visibilization provides a diction, in which we can analyse legally relevant experiences, which have not yet crossed the threshold into the formal system of law.

‘A Hope Raised and then Defeated’? the Continuing Harms of Irish Abortion Law

“…The absence of security in respect of reproductive rights under the changed constitutional landscape places pregnant people in a space of interstitial legality (Krajewska and Cahill-O’Callaghan, 2019) in which they are visible to the law in uncertain form. No longer criminals, they are also not clearly rights-bearers.…”

“…It was never about recognising women’s agency or the unbearability of the burdens of the 8 th Amendment. Rather, it was always about maintaining the myth (Smyth, 2016) of an abortion-free Ireland and about punishing—through stigma, exile, constitutional invisibilisation (Krajewska and Cahill-O’Callaghan, 2019) and criminalisation—women who dared to subvert this ‘resolutely foetocentric’ narrative (Enright, 2019, p. 58).…”

“…Within that new legal regime, I argue, pregnant people continue to lack decisional security when it comes to their reproductive lives, exposing them to significant constitutional and dignitary harms (Sanger, 2009). Resultantly, pregnant people in Ireland now occupy a space of interstitial legality (Krajewska and Cahill-O’Callaghan, 2019) in which the constitutional labour of securing a rights-based approach to abortion regulation remains with abortion seekers and reproductive rights activists.…”

Documenting Families: Paper-Work in Family Display among Planned Single Father Families

“…France, Spain). Following a landmark ruling in the UK family court in January 2019, it is now possible for single people in Britain to apply for parental orders following the birth of their children through surrogacy, and thus become their legal parents (Krajewska and Cahill-O’Callaghan, 2020). Single men in the UK can also become parents through adoption.…”

Children of Single Fathers Created by Surrogacy: Psychosocial Adjustment Considerations and Implications for Research and Practice

“…As the occurrence of single-father families (defined as a group of one male parent and their children living together as a unit [ 1 ]) formed by surrogacy becomes more visible, and therefore, seen as a way of social modification that facilitates the debunking of more traditional understandings of the concept of family [ 2 ], more becomes known about those men who wish to be or who already are single fathers using surrogacy. Not only do they contest the current artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs) legal agenda, in which the legal body is primarily female, but they also must defy the challenges linked to the circumstance that their fatherhood will be illegal in most countries around the world [ 3 ]. Hence, single men seeking surrogacy, i.e., single men who are seeking to establish a contract in which a woman approves the gestation of a baby for them after ARTs, may have to deal with significant sociopolitical limitations, since even though there are some thirty-six countries worldwide with surrogacy regulations, the vast majority of them prohibits access to intended single fathers [ 4 ].…”