Mothering for Money: Regulating Commercial Intimacy, Surrogacy, Adoption,

Roundtable on Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technology 201

Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011 Special Report on Poverty

The sheer scale of needs associated with being poor or near poor dwarfs the resources of even the largest Jewish community in the United States. One is tempted to believe that the scale of need is so vast that the Jewish community should abandon this field to others.Yet since the earliest days of Jewish communal life in New York, the organized Jewish community has accepted its responsibilities to care for those in need. Even since the New Deal, when the federal government took on the primary role of providing a societal safety net, the Jewish community has been active in providing philanthropic support and services for poor and near-poor Jews.The numbers of poor and near-poor Jewish households, the enormous increase in the number of these households over the past 20 years, and the diverse groups affected by poverty create an imperative for an extraordinary response -- from government, the voluntary sector, the philanthropic sector, and all segments of society. These findings suggest that the organized Jewish community needs to take a hard look at current planning, advocacy, service delivery, and resource investment

Money, Caregiving, and Kinship: Should Paid Caregivers Be Allowed to Obtain De Facto Parental Status

The law of custody and visitation is expanding to include the possibility of non-biological and non-adoptive parents\u27 legal access to children. The concept of the psychological parent or functional caretaker is becoming increasingly prevalent and influential in state law. Moreover, the ALI Principles of Family Dissolution include two categories of psychological parents - parents by estoppel and de facto parents - in its proposed guidelines for who can petition for custody and visitation rights to children. Yet, both state law and the ALl Principles exclude caretakers who receive compensation - including foster parents, paid child care providers and surrogate mothers - from the categories of psychological parents to whom courts may grant such rights. In this article, I argue that the receipt of compensation for child care should not automatically disqualify caretakers from potentially achieving de facto legal status if the psychological bond is otherwise strong and the other requisites are met. In fact, I argue that such a rigid approach sacrifices significant benefits to children and caretakers. Excluding those who receive compensation for the care they give denigrates the value of care given by paid caregivers, misjudges the strength of the psychological bond between paid caregivers and children, and discriminates against the poor and racial minorities. While legitimate concerns regarding allowing a third party to use the power of the state to infringe on the parentchild relationship, as well as more general anxiety about mixing money and the personal relationship of care, must be addressed, I recommend a more nuanced approach to addressing these concerns. This approach takes into account both the paid nature of the relationship as well as the strength of the psychological bond involved. Just as feminists have argued that caretaking work needs to be compensated, compensated caretaking work needs to be legally recognizedfor the value it provides

The Health/Care Divide: Breastfeeding in the New Millenium

Given recent health and cultural pressures to breastfeed, this Article argues that legal and societal developments should enable working mothers to choose whether or not to breastfeed without sacrificing their employment. In analyzing current solutions for working mothers, we identify two major developments, which we term “separation strategies,” to contend with the health push: limited and unpaid pumping breaks at work established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the advent of an online market in human milk. We critique these developments, despite the limited relief they may provide, for the way these strategies do not provide sufficient breastfeeding support and separate the nurturing act of breastfeeding from the nutritional benefits believed to be contained in breastmilk as a sole recourse for working women. Separation strategies reflect the legal and societal undervaluing of direct, symbiotic parental care and the way scientific priorities tend to separate and sterilize nutritional and relational benefits while overlooking additional health benefits of the breastfeeding method, as well as the cost, threats to breastmilk supply, and distributive effects of separation strategies. We describe the way legislative measures, antidiscrimination law, and constitutional rights have failed to aid breastfeeding mothers in the workplace. Finally, we articulate ways in which the workplace can be restructured to accommodate breastfeeding and, as a result, parental care more generally