Lacquer speaks to the emotional roots of parenting, rather than biology, and I think that this explains the judgment in the Mary and Jhordan case. The specifics about the need for the involvement of a physician in order to separate a woman from a donor is an attempt to cut off this emotional investment, and the confusion in the case arose from the failure of Mary to fully explain to Jhordan her intentions, leaving his name off of the birth certificate while saying she would "acknowledge" him as the father. I agree with Lacquer that is the emotional connections of parenting, rather than biology that matter. In fact, the biological argument itself is somewhat suspect: the hormones produced by childbearing that are supposed to bond a mother to her child can also result in postpartum depression and a complete rejection and hatred toward the child. Adrienne brings up an important point about the difficulty of making this emotional parenting legal, that is, bringing  it into family law. In the case of an abandoned child, I think that the law necessarily looks to biological parents in order to find someone to take responsibility for someone that cannot be responsible for themselves. However, I think that the legal system also needs to take into account emotional parents (or "psychological parents") in cases where that parents seeks continued custody or a relationship with a child, like the Lofton v. Fluoroy case. 

In Nicholson's article, she responds to the "anything goes" critique with a somewhat puzzling argument of intolerance: "but to say that [historically new family types usually occur for a reason] does not entail that tolerance is always warranted or warranted to include all specifics" (37). But if a family should be judged on whether it provides "economic and emotional sustenance to its members, given its resources," then it seems that the literal family type is irrelevant. So what kind of family structure would Nicholson not tolerate?