Currently, the Description and Scope of the RelatedPerson resource reads:

Information about a person that is involved in the care for a patient, but who is not the target of healthcare, nor has a formal responsibility in the care process.

RelatedPersons typically have a personal or non-healthcare-specific professional relationship to the patient. A RelatedPerson resource is primarily used for attribution of information, since RelatedPersons are often a source of information about the patient. For keeping information about people for contact purposes for a patient, use a Patient's Contact element. Some individuals may serve as both a Patient's Contact and a Related Person.

For a birth defect reporting use case we need to capture information on the parents (things like level of education, alcohol/drug use, etc). However sometimes the parent is deceased but we still want to capture their information in a RelatedPerson resource, but this seems a bit at odds with the description as they can't be involved in patient care (because they are deceased or otherwise out of the picture). It would be helpful if the description could be included to accommodate this sort of use case. 

As well, our IG will likely create extensions similar to those for Patient for deceased[x] (standard element in Patient) and birthPlace (standard extension for Patient) if you would like to consider those for inclusion in the base as standard extensions to RelatedPerson (otherwise we'll just keep them in the IG as extensions).

The initial discussion Zulip is available at https://chat.fhir.org/#narrow/stream/179166-implementers/topic/Recording.20Mothers.20and.20Fathers.