The Meanings of Literal

Abstract

In a simpler world, "Who's your mother?" has a simple answer. It is your female parent, the person who supplied the egg from which you were conceived, who carried and gave birth to you, who raised you, and who was married to your father. The word mother is defined relative to an idealized and oversimplified model of the world in which all those criteria converge to pick out a single person. But in a world in which there is in vitro fertilization in surrogate mothers, adoption by lesbian couples, as well as other vagaries of modern life, the criteria that are commonly assumed to come together to define "mother" may diverge radically. In such cases, there is no completely satisfactory way to choose: Both the woman who gives birth and the woman who supplies the egg have some claim to the title, as, of course, does the woman who raises the child. Any decision the courts make in defining motherhood in nonstandard cases is bound to conflict with our idealized model in which all the classical criteria for motherhood converge.