Introduction

It is increasingly common for children to be brought up in families differing greatly from the traditional unit formed by a married couple and their children. Today, society accepts that parent-child relationships can be created through adoption, fostering, reproductive technologies, unmarried birth, family breakdown and step-parenting. Indeed, the law accommodates the fact that adults caring for children may have a social relationship with them which is far more important to the children themselves than any link with their biological progenitors. Nevertheless, society shows great ambivalence over what significance to attach to the biological tie between a child and birth parents. Does the tie's existence, in itself, justify the creation of a social relationship between them where none existed before, or is it enough for the child to be given accurate information about the identity of an absent parent? Furthermore, where should the law stand in relation to a growing view that all children have a right to know the identity of their birth parents?

These questions have become increasingly important, given the law's response to the technological developments which undermine old assumptions about the legal linkage between parents and children. The increasing availability of accurate DNA testing and of reproductive technologies (commonly donor conception) are probably the two developments which have provoked most debate in this context. DNA testing has an obvious significance. In the past, ‘normal’ childhood involved children being brought up within nuclear families by those they assumed to be their biological parents.