Tag Archives: Biblical Stories

Split the Baby?

King Solomon of Israel was called upon, in 1 Kings 3:16-28 of the Hebrew Bible, to determine which of two women was the mother of an infant boy.  One woman’s newborn had died and the other woman’s newborn had lived, but both lay claim to the surviving infant.  In his great wisdom, King Solomon raised a sword and offered to split the baby in two, knowing that the child’s true mother would rather give up her child than let him be harmed.  The first woman agreed with the plan, but the second urged the king to “give her the living child, and in no wise slay it.”  Solomon had his answer.

Though courts do not raise swords or threaten to split babies in two, they are frequently called upon to determine questions of parentage, or who are a child’s legal parents.  A legal parent must support the child, but also has the constitutional right to determine almost every aspect of the child’s life. An adult who does not qualify as a legal parent can avoid financial obligations, but also can be shut out completely from the child’s life.  Legal parentage also determines many economic rights. Parentage law can thus make or break a family and deeply affect the life of a child.

Resources
From Verdict
Unhappy Wife, Unhappy Life: The Misguided Attack by Conservatives on No-Fault Divorce One need not scroll too far down any news or social media feed these days to find a conservative diatribe against no-fault divorce. The issue was thru...
Bad Friday: Federal Judge Rules that 23-Year-Old FDA Approval of Abortion Drug Was Invalid At the close of business on Good Friday, federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk released a ruling in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine vs. U.S. Food and Drug...
The Ghost of Anthony Comstock and the Abortion Wars In June 2022, the Supreme Court eliminated constitutional protection for abortion—forty-nine years after it had first announced that protection in Roe...
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Tweets
06/01/2023
From the Blog
Raising Arizona Babies Arizona Supreme Court in McLaughlin v. Jones was asked an increasingly familiar question: Does the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges ...
Why Lesbian Co-Parents Still Live in Limbo Although the parenting rights of people in same-sex couples have generally been on the rise—particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2015 rulin...
So Many Unanswered Questions about ART Assisted reproductive technology (ART) surrounds us. Courts are certainly not strangers to the parentage questions that can arise out from situations ...
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