Dr. Thomas Finegan:

Drawing an analogy with everyday life and saying there are single parents who bring up children and children are brought up in all circumstances is not especially helpful in the sense we are dealing with legislation, we are dealing with something that is sui generisand we are dealing with the proposal to create new family circumstances so the best interests are engaged in a far more direct way with legislation like this.
In terms of what rights children have, when we look through the Constitution, there is a strong sense running through decades of case law that children have a right to the care and support of their parents. That is plural and that is understood in a genetic sense. Likewise under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Children, parents is the ordinary meaning according to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which governs interpretation of international texts. I have to disagree with other presenters. The ordinary meaning is mum and dad. If one looks at other parts of the UNCRC, again it is understood to mean a mum and a dad and it is understood in the plural. Other terms are used in the convention when they want to talk about other types of care arrangements. Again in the UNCRC, there is this sense that there is a right to parents, plural, primarily meaning a mum and a dad. General schemes such as this give no consideration whatsoever to those rights and in fact place above them a right that has far less of a pedigree in constitutional law and international human rights law - the right to have a child - and I would say there is a denigrating of children's rights and a prioritisation of adult rights, specifically the right to reproductive autonomy.