A new report called ‘One parent or five?’ has just been published in America. The author is Elizabeth Marquardt, an expert on how Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR) is causing a revolution in our view of parenthood. Elizabeth has previously been a guest of The Iona Institute.

This revolution was on display in two ways in recent days. On Saturday, Marian Finucane interviewed a couple on her show who have been to India and brought home a child born to them via a surrogate mother.

The other involved a case in Britain where a judge was asked to adjudicate in a row involving four would-be ‘parents’ of two girls.

In her new paper, Elizabeth draws attention to the new distinction being made between biological parents and so-called ‘intentional parents’.

In the Brave New World of intentional parents (actually in Brave New World there were no parents as such at all), the intent to be a parent is much more important than the fact of biological parenthood.

Indeed, being the biological parent of a child becomes incidental. The biological parent is really only the parent if he or she intends or wishes to be the parent. This will be presumed in most cases of course.

But if the biological parent does not wish to be the parent, and is willing to give his or her child to someone who does wish or intend to be the parent, then the law should facilitate this. That is how the new thinking goes.

The judge in the English case must have wished he had read Elizabeth’s paper. The case involved two warring same-sex couples. The first, a lesbian couple, comprised the girls’ biological mother and her partner, the other the children’s biological father and his partner.

The two couples fell out when the two men wanted more access to the children and the case wound up in court.

Poor Mr Justice Hedley expressed frustration at the ‘lack of sufficient vocabulary to explain the true nature of the relationships’.

He’s not alone in this. Once we enter into a world of intentional as distinct from biological parenthood, it becomes much less clear-cut who is a child’s parent and who isn’t.

There was no doubt as to who the girls’ biological parents are. But is the mother’s partner also a parent? Is the father’s partner a parent? They both wished and intended to be so maybe the children should have four ‘parents’.

And if the biological father didn’t intend to be the child’s father, did that suddenly mean he wasn’t the father despite the facts of biology? You can see why the judge was confused.

Meanwhile the couple interviewed by Marian Finucane expressed frustration that they are not recognised as their child’s legal parents even though they are its biological parents.

Under Irish law the birth mother is presumed to be the biological mother and takes no account of surrogacy whether here or overseas.

This couple is of course in a legal limbo. What was interesting about the interview is that both the couple and Marian simply assumed (rightly in my view) that because the couple is the child’s biological parents they are the parents, period.

But probably if Marian was interviewing a couple who in addition to using a surrogate mother had also used another woman’s egg, and maybe even another man’s sperm, she’d have taken a different view.

In any case, these considerations are separate from the issue of surrogacy itself which is very well dealt with by Breda O’Brien in this paper she wrote on behalf of The Iona Institute.