for The Bold Pursuit
(Written October 15, 2014)
There is a saying that says it’s a wise man who knows who
his children are. Unfortunately, no
amount of wisdom can help a child know who his or her father is. It gets even worse when the problem is the
fault of reproductive technology gone awry.
Perhaps that is going too easy on the technology. Perhaps even when the technology does not go
awry, there might still be a problem.
Take the case of Jennifer Cramblett and her daughter. Jennifer is white. Her daughter is mixed race. Okay, so far no problem, at least not with
the daughter. The problem is, according
to news reports, a sperm bank, which artificially inseminated Ms
Cramblett. Jennifer had specifically
requested a white donor. The sperm bank
gave her the sperm from a black donor.
That donor is now the anonymous and absent biological father of baby
Cramblett, an innocent child.
This is not the problem.
Getting the wrong donor is not the problem. Getting any donor at all is the problem, even
the “right” donor.
Perhaps the story would not be so sensational were Jennifer
Cramblett a single woman, or a married woman whose husband is infertile. That is not the case. Cramblett is a lesbian woman living with a
lesbian partner. Due to the cruelty of
biology, two people of the same sex cannot conceive a child with each other. So they chose a technological method.
You won't need no husband,
won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick
your daughter too
From the bottom of a long
glass tube
From Zager and Evans
1969 hit song,
In the Year 2525
Here we have a perfect storm of social controversies
converging destructively, while attention is deflected to details that don’t
matter. Such details include liability.
On the question of liability, should the sperm bank pay
damages? The answer depends not on
morals, but on contract law and civil rights.
Under contract law, the sperm bank most likely made a promise to deliver
a specific service for a specific fee with explicit and implied guarantees. It will take a court to untangle the
complexities. One of the complexities
might well be this: even if the sperm
bank promised to deliver the sperm of a white man, is that promise racially discriminatory
and therefore immune from liability? I’m
not a lawyer, so I don’t know.
But I do know this:
conceiving and raising a child is not, and should not be, a decision
based in fine points of law, nor in the capabilities of technology. The child is a human being, with unalienable
rights. His or her conception should not
be based on frivolous grounds. Children
should not be ordered from a catalog, neither to match the living room décor,
nor to conform to the racial color scheme of a neighborhood. Technology should not provide a convenient
means of enabling a woman to not provide her child with a loving and involved
father.
The myth that children, with absent fathers, do not suffer
adverse consequences was debunked years ago.
In April 1993, the cover story on the mostly liberal journal, The Atlantic proclaimed this:
The social-science evidence is in: though it may benefit the adults
involved, the dissolution of intact two-parent families is harmful to large
numbers of children. Moreover, the author argues, family diversity in the form
of increasing numbers of single-parent and stepparent families does not
strengthen the social fabric but, rather, dramatically weakens and undermines
society. [end quote]
While the article did not
address lesbian artificial insemination, it did address the ridicule leveled at
Vice President Dan Quayle for his criticism of a television situation comedy in
which the main character, a fictional woman named Murphy Brown, elected to get
pregnant out of wedlock, eschewing for her child a loving and involved father.
Years later, the details have
changed, but the morals remain the same.
The morals still trump ideology.
They trump gay rights. They trump
liberal doctrines of fairness and equality.
They override any and all fanciful models which pretend that a family
without a father is just as functional as any other.
Let’s be clear that many
families suffer tragic disruptions that make the ideal unachievable, through no
fault of the mother. That cannot be
avoided. What can be avoided is the
intentional infliction of needless adversity on innocent children.
The fact of that adversity,
where the father is absent, is not a conservative opinion. It is a sociological and statistical
fact. For every case in which someone
might claim that a child benefitted from not having a loving and involved
father, there are many hundreds more that provide tragic confirmation that Dan
Quayle was indeed right.
Unfortunately, the truth gets
buried in convoluted dissembling from the social left. The moment one mentions the facts, he is
accused of being bigoted, homophobic, anti-woman and of horse thievery.
The fact is that it does not take
a village to raise a child.
.
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