New technological developments and scientific advances raise increasingly complex questions about the nature and extent of parental responsibility. Findings in the field of genetics and embryology, as well as new understandings of how our brains work and develop, complicate these matters even more. This creates a need to reflect on the ways in which parental responsibility can or should be operationalised in the face of these new challenges – a task we undertake in this volume. The idea behind this volume arose over a lunchtime discussion between the editors, then colleagues at Maastricht University, in the spring of 2013. Having discovered a common thread in our respective research projects, we organised a symposium on parental responsibility later that year. The Centre for Society and the Life Sciences in the Netherlands supported this initiative, and the symposium was a great opportunity for us to learn more about how parental responsibility is reflected in each of our own research areas. It was this symposium that led us ultimately to the publication of the present volume. We wish to thank the contributors for their work and their patience in preparing this volume. We also thank Rebecca Bennett, Inge Liebaers and David Shaw for reviewing some of the chapters and the participants at the symposium for their helpful comments.