To whom do children belong? This is the prompt with which Melissa Moschella frames a book that seeks to defend parental rights with regard to what she calls their “biological” children (p. 6). In particular, Moschella wishes to defend parents’ rights to educate their biological children according to the strictures of their moral and religious consciences and comprehensive visions of the good life.

Beginning in the introduction and running through the book, the passive formulation of the title question is telling (p. 1). Moschella suggests that children belong first and foremost to their so-called biological parents by virtue of the genetic fusion of their gametes in sexual reproduction (p. 9). In Chapter 1, she provides the only working definition of this claim in a footnote: “I use the term biological parents to refer to genetic parents” (p. 34 n. 29).

The author’s primary philosophical inspiration, Saint Thomas Aquinas, lacked knowledge of modern biology, genetics, and reproductive technology. A first-rate philosopher, he should be excused for thinking that sperm and wombs have magical properties. Philosophers who value Thomas’s argumentative model, however, know that we must avoid the logical error of mere appeals to the authority of past thinkers. Instead, we must reason through the flaws of even traditional sources of authority. Rather than appeal to Thomas as an authority on “the conjugal union” as a “spiritual womb” (p. 28), Moschella would have done well to follow through on Thomas’s own scrupulous commitment to critical reasoning on a range of sources bearing on a philosophical issue, questioning their assumptions and moving forward to sometimes unexpected and creative philosophical conclusions as a result of such engagement with past authorities.

That said, there are classic thinkers to whom Moschella could have turned for insight into the question of children’s moral relationship to biological parents, yet they are oddly ignored. John Locke, an enthusiastic defender of private property, was absolutely clear that parents did not own their children. Moreover, the act of begetting does not make a father, Locke wisely wrote in the Second Treatise. Rather, a foster father (a nonbiological father) is the true father if he is the one to care for the child and take primary responsibility for the child’s life, well-being, and education.

Moschella mentions Locke once, but only to dissociate her view of the biological basis of parenthood from those who claim that parents own their children as property (pp. 27–28). She never addresses Locke’s broader (and visionary) argument that parenthood itself is not biological but, rather, based on dutiful practices of care for the children who depend on it for surviving and thriving. Locke’s theory allows for adoptive and foster parents to be as fully parents as parents whose gametes helped to produce the child under their primary and dutiful care. She privileges genetic parents within her Thomistic view of marriage, but in so doing reduces true/biological parenthood to the functional equivalent of gamete donation. This is ironic in light of her several asides in the footnotes that strongly suggest her view of the immorality of gamete donation and assisted reproductive technology for purposes of fertility treatment (pp. 35–36, nn. 29–33).

Locke’s profound ethical arguments about the nonbiological basis of fatherhood have since been extended (by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and other feminists) to all parents, regardless of gender, sex, sexuality, reproductive circumstances, or other social status or scientific classification. This social model of parenthood is now the dominant view across the social sciences—yet it is a complex view which Moschella delimits and flattens as “conventional,” “Rawlsian,” “liberal,” and opposed to her own “natural and original” view of the moral relationship of parent and child (p. 6). Such binaries only obscure the fact that the social model of parenthood never denies the biological facts of life, so to speak, but rather seeks to critically understand the limits of their moral and political implications.

The core of the book (Chapters 2 and 3) sets forth Moschella’s extended defense of the view (a) that parental rights are best conceptualized “as conscience rights” with regard to one’s genetic children and (b) that these “conscience rights” apply most forcefully in the realm of children’s education, because education is the process by which children develop in a holistic way toward a fully good and happy life (pp. 49, 74). Three serious questions occur to the reader right off the bat: (1) If parental rights to conscience-driven education derive from their duties toward their genetic children, then what is the moral status of those genetic parents who do not know, do not care about, or, worse, fail to care for, or worst of all, abuse their genetic children? (2) If education is primarily and naturally the domain of biological (i.e., genetic) parents’ consciences, then how are we to legitimate and authorize, let alone specify, any role for any kind of state with respect to children’s development and well-being? (3) What are the rights of children with regard to parents, education, and the state, independent of their circumstances of reproduction and family life?

As for the first question, Moschella argues that in cases of abuse and neglect, the state has a right to step in and assume responsibility for the education and care of the children. She presumably means to say that this exception to the rule of conscientious parental authority in education applies to both genetic or nongenetic children, but never explains why this is the case according to her Thomistic natural-law framework—perhaps because it cannot be done. Instead, in the final chapter, she posits that judges should decide what counts as child abuse and neglect, thereby granting the courts a deus ex machina-like power to sweep in and determine when the principle of noninterference in parental conscience should give way to state intervention in children’s education.

With regard to the second question, it is never explained what the role of any state should be in providing fitting substitutes for neglectful or abusive parents, whether genetic or not. As to the third, Moschella evades the question of children’s rights up until the fourth and final chapter, where she raises the question only to quickly dismiss it as irrelevant to her position (p. 156). Instead, she returns to the notion that judges have a kind of surrogate parent role in cases of suspected neglect or abuse, and become a kind of legal proxy for genetic parents in ensuring (a) that parental conscience rights persist as the rule and (b) that legal protection of children’s autonomy and freedom from abuse and neglect is the exception, to be granted on a case-by-case basis according to presumed judicial prudence and wisdom (p. 159).

Although Moschella indicates that she holds a correlative view of the relationship of rights to duties (as in “any rights claim could be translated into a claim about moral obligation”), she never once entertains the idea that children might hold equally weighty rights in relation to their (social and/or biological) parents’ duty to educate them (p. 18). Her next book might productively begin with the question, “Do children have rights?” An exploration of children’s conscience rights with regard to their own education in relation to adult responsibility, especially during adolescence, would be a welcome addition to a growing, diverse, and fascinating literature within political theory that takes the family seriously in matters of politics.