Who Is a Parent? Reflections on Plural Models of Filiation between Legislative Silence and Constitutional Court Intervention

Abstract

The article investigates the constitutional transformation of parenthood in the Italian legal system, taking as its interpretive key the growing dissociation between biological fact, legal status, and family model. Its central thesis is that judgments nos. 68 and 69 of 2025 of the Constitutional Court do not reflect a fluctuating line of case law, but rather articulate two distinct standards of review: full, ex post protection of the status and rights of the child already born; and, ex ante, deference to legislative discretion in access to medically assisted reproduction. What emerges is a Court that remedies constitutionally intolerable asymmetries without replacing the legislature, whose persistent silence remains the true systemic critical issue.