Two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in Mirabelli v. Bonta, restoring a lower-court injunction that blocks California from enforcing policies requiring school employees to conceal a child’s gender transition from parents. The ruling reinforced a principle that has appeared again and again in American constitutional law: The parent-child relationship occupies a privileged position above and beyond the interventions of outside adults and institutions.
That idea has deep roots. A century ago, the Supreme Court declared in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) that parents possess the liberty to direct their children’s education and upbringing. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the Court reaffirmed that “the child is not the mere creature of the State.” And in Troxel v. Granville (2000), it once again recognized parental authority as a fundamental liberty interest. These cases rest on the common premise that the state does not create the parent-child relationship. It merely recognizes and protects a relationship that already exists.
Yet even as courts are reaffirming this principle, American family law is erasing the relationship those rights were meant to protect.
The doctrine of parental rights rests on a straightforward observation about human nature. In general, biological parents are the adults most protective of their children, most connected to their children, and the most invested in their future and welfare.
That investment expresses itself in countless ways. Biological parents tend to devote more time, energy, and resources to raising their children. They protect them, sacrifice for them, and remain responsible for them across decades. While no family structure guarantees the absence of abuse, the married biological family remains statistically the safest. The law historically recognized that this natural bond produces a level of commitment and protection that other adults typically cannot match.
Teachers, counselors, doctors, and social workers all play valuable roles in children’s lives. But they are not parents. They lack the lifelong attachment and responsibility that anchor parental authority. For that reason, American law traditionally resisted allowing outsiders to direct a child’s upbringing. The presumption has long been that parents, not institutions, should guide a child’s development.
When biological parents were absent, the legal system historically pursued the closest possible substitute: adoption. But adoption was never treated casually. It required careful screening, home studies, background checks, and judicial oversight. Courts sought to ensure that adoptive parents would provide the same stability and protection children would ordinarily receive from their biological parents.
Modern parentage law increasingly recognizes parenthood based not on biology or adoption but on adult intention. This is most evident in statutes derived from the 2017 revision of the Uniform Parentage Act, which many states have adopted in some form. The act states: “An individual who consents to assisted reproduction with the intent to be a parent of a child conceived by assisted reproduction is a parent of the child.”
The shift may sound benign, but it represents a profound inversion of how American law has historically recognized parenthood. Under this framework, parenthood may be established through intention expressed in advance, often through medical procedures or contractual arrangements. Assisted reproduction, donor gametes, surrogacy agreements, and pre-birth parentage orders all operate within this system.
In practice, the framework allows biological parents to be legally displaced while unrelated adults are installed as parents from the outset. And the Uniform Parentage Act deliberately bypasses the safeguards established for adoption. The result is a system capable of severing the very biological relationship that parental rights doctrine was originally designed to protect.
In these arrangements, the state does not merely recognize parents. It designates them. Parenthood becomes something the law assigns rather than something the law observes.
Nearly a dozen states have adopted statutes granting unrelated adults this option for accessing children. In each case, the underlying principle is similar: Adult intent determines legal parenthood even in the absence of a biological relationship.
This parental overhaul did not arise in isolation, but was accelerated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which required states to recognize marriages between same-sex couples. The ruling focused on marriage, but its implications predictably extended to parenthood. Equal treatment of married couples meant that same-sex couples would need comparable access to the legal status of parenthood. Because same-sex spouses can never both be biologically related to a child, the law had to accomplish what their bodies prohibited. Achieving “equality” required a legal framework that detached parenthood from biological reality.
Assisted reproduction and surrogacy therefore became central mechanisms through which parenthood could be legally established. Intent-based parentage rules ensured that the adults commissioning or arranging the birth of a child could be recognized as the child’s legal parents regardless of biological connection.
In effect, the law increasingly defined parenthood not by who created the child but by who contracted to raise the child. This development has produced a striking tension within American law. The parental rights doctrine that once protected children from outside interference now operates alongside a legal framework that authorizes the state to designate those very outsiders as a child’s legal parents from birth.
The contrast becomes clearer when considering the scale of the intrusions involved. Preventing a school from sending home deceptive paperwork or imposing a particular classroom policy represents a relatively modest interference with parental authority. Reassigning parenthood itself is something else entirely. The law now fiercely guards against small interferences with parental authority while simultaneously authorizing the most sweeping interference imaginable.
The stakes of this contradiction are not merely theoretical. Across the United States, parents have discovered that some districts treat children as though they belong primarily to the institution rather than to their families. In one widely discussed case, Abigail Martin shared how school officials facilitated her daughter Yaeli’s social transition without parental knowledge. Yaeli later died by suicide. Martin’s account reflects the fear that animates many parental rights cases: that institutions claiming authority over children can make life-altering decisions while excluding the people most responsible for and invested in their welfare.
The risks are not confined to schools. The logic of intent-based parenthood deliberately places children in households with adults who are not biologically related to them and who have not undergone the screening required in adoption. Last summer a viral video of two men showcasing their surrogate-born son was followed quickly by the discovery that one “dad,” Brandon Keith Mitchell, was a convicted sex offender.
Parental rights are not a constitutional abstraction. They are the closest our species has come to a formula that facilitates children being truly safe and loved.
The ruling in Mirabelli upheld the traditional understanding: Parents possess authority over their children that the government must respect. For more than a century, American courts have treated the parent-child bond as a relationship that law protects but does not create. Yet modern parentage law increasingly assumes the state may determine who the parents are in the first place.
The two theories cannot coexist. Our legal system must ultimately decide whether parenthood precedes the state or depends upon it.
