  Although some thinkers have advocated licensing parents (Mill 1869, LaFollette 1980), today anyone who can biologically produce a child can be a parent. (The issue becomes complicated when more than two people are involved in the production of a child, as we will see below.) Adoption is highly regulated by law, but once an adoption is completed, law treats biological and non-biological parents alike with respect to raising their children. Society gives wide discretion to all families in rearing children and intervenes only when children suffer abuse, or where the family falls apart. Earlier courts used a “best interests” standard to determine custody in such cases. But this standard has been subjected to powerful criticisms: reasonable people will differ about what constitutes the “best” for their child; and the standard is easily susceptible to biases based on class, race and sexual orientation. Ian Shapiro (1999) advocates a “basic interest” standard for legitimizing state intervention. We might think of such basic interests as defining a line beneath which no child should be allowed to sink. The question for feminists here is whether gender equality is a basic interest of children and if so how best to promote it.