Project description
A legal reframing of modern parenthood
Today’s families are diverse, mobile, and shaped by assisted reproductive technologies. However, legal parenthood has lagged behind. Traditional frameworks, which were designed to define identity, regulate adult behaviour, and mark family legitimacy, struggle to reflect today’s complex realities. Conflicting rules for children conceived naturally versus those born through assisted reproductive technology further fragment the system, creating gaps between law and everyday family life. With this in mind, the ERC-funded ReKINdle project aims to address this challenge by reimagining parenthood as a two-way legal interdependency between parent and child. Investigating England and Wales, Ireland, Poland, and Sweden, the project explores historical, social, and legal dimensions of parenthood, assesses the impact of state oversight, and proposes holistic reforms that align legal structures with contemporary family life.
Objective
Legal parenthood (i.e. the package of legal recognition, rights and obligation that typically attaches to the parent-child nexus) has undergone incremental change in response to scientific developments in assisted reproductive technology (ART) and human rights challenges but has fragmented due to its inadequacy to reflect the complexity of modern family life. The legal rules establishing the parent-child link now encompass different and conflicting regulatory functions at the same time – establishing legal identity, managing adult behaviour, marking family deservingness, and acting as genealogical information. As society has become more diverse, more children’s rights focussed, more tolerant of different family forms, and more internationally mobile, these different and competing regulatory functions can no longer be fulfilled by an anachronistic adult status. ReKINdle provides a new way to think about the legal nexus between parent and child, not as an adult status, but as a two-way legal interdependency between parent and child. Every country in Europe predicates parenthood on maternity by birth with a separate legal regime for children conceived through ART. ReKINdle goes beyond tinkering with legal rules assigning parentage to rethink the entire basis of family law. ReKINdle interrogates the historical, legal and social dimensions of legal parenthood in Ireland, England and Wales, Sweden and Poland to expose the gaps between the regulatory work that the concept of legal parenthood is currently doing and the social expectations that are placed on the concept. This radical approach assesses how legal parenthood works in a holistic fashion, investigating lived experiences of parents and children navigating different life stages. ReKINdle also examines the limits and perspectives surrounding state policing of parental status using prefigurative law to explores new ways of thinking from state perspectives.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
4 DUBLIN
Ireland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.