Tag Archives: Fatherlessness

Commentary

Is it moral for a woman to conceive a child from an anonymous sperm donor?

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I am opposed to any policy or program that increases the odds that a child will not have a relationship with their biological father as they grow up. This would include anything that makes it easier for parents to divorce or that facilitates single motherhood. Consequently, I oppose premarital sex, abortion, sex education in schools, no-fault divorce, and giving legal recognition to cohabitation or same-sex marriage. I want children to be able to have their biological father and biological mother close at hand, and to be able to rely on them and know them, so that they don’t feel alone and lost in the world. Although I am willing to permit other arrangements, I think society should celebrate traditional marriage – for the sake of the children.

Well, consider one challenge to this ideal situation where a child grows up with a mother and a father: conception via anonymous sperm donor.

Here’s a video that shows how children are hurt when they are denied a relationship with their biological father: (H/T Stacy McCain)

Robert Stacy McCain writes this:

The practice of anonymous sperm donors, and children fathered by them, is certainly legal and has a market. That would lead one to conclude that it is ethical, rather than unethical. In other words I’d say ethical means ‘not illegal’.

But is it moral? […]That is, does anyone think that the Almighty is pleased, and/or glorified by people thumbing their noses at the clear, simple, obvious, form-follows-function beauty of:

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Gen 2:24

There is vast capacity to use modern technology to tinker about with the natural order of things. I’d like to fall short of a sweeping judgement here, in the space of a blog post. It’s possible that there may exist a really good case for why using an anonymous sperm donor is not immoral. But it seems that protecting the father’s (or the mother’s in the case of an egg donor) privacy at the expense of dropping a sizable existential dilemma on the offspring is immoral. That is, the biological parents (i.e. DNA providers) are doing to the child emotionally what the government is doing economically: casting debts upon them without any sort of dialogue. A variation on taxation without representation, if you will. Progressivism seems to be about finding the least vocal victim.

I don’t think that it’s enough for the child to just know who their biological father is, or to just see a picture of their biological father. I think it’s important that we promote the best situation for children, where each child has a real relationship with their biological father. And we can do that, if we are serious, in several ways.

Promoting marriage

Here are few wild, shoot-from-the-hip ideas to help children to have access to their fathers:

  1. We can research how fatherlessness affects children
  2. We can research what decisions are likely to lead to stable marriage, e.g. – regular church attendance and chastity
  3. We can repeal laws that are hostile to lasting marriage, e.g. – no-fault divorce
  4. We can enact laws that are hostile to divorce, e.g. – shared custody laws
  5. We can stop paying unmarried women to have babies
  6. We can give tax deductions to married couples who have babies
  7. We can give tax deductions to couples planning on marrying if they undergo marital counseling from a program of their own choosing
  8. We can give tax deductions to married couples whose children earn incomes, e.g. – the parents get a tax deduction for 1% of income earned by each child for life
  9. We can give tax deductions to married couples whose children don’t collect government assistance, e.g. – the parents get a 1% tax deduction on their household income for every child who doesn’t collect government welfare during the year
  10. We ban IVF for women who have not been married for at least 5 years
  11. We ban all taxpayer funding of IVF treatments
  12. We ban ban all private insurance coverage for IVF treatments

And so on, like that. This communicates to women that it is not OK to have a baby with an anonymous sperm donor. It communicates that we as a society want fathers to be around their children. It communicates that cohabitation is not the same thing as marriage. It communicates that marriages are for life. We need to get tough if we want children to be spared from the harm of not knowing their biological fathers.

News

What’s behind the explosion of sexual activity among college students?

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Consider this article about the problem first, from the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.

Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death for young adults aged 17-24. Students who engage in binge drinking (about two in five) are 25 times more likely to do things like miss class, fall behind in school work, engage in unplanned sexual activity, and get in trouble with the law. They also cause trouble for other students, who are subjected to physical and sexual assault, suffer property damage and interrupted sleep, and end up babysitting problem drinkers.

Hooking up is getting to be as common as drinking. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who heads the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, says that in various studies, 40%-64% of college students report doing it.

The effects are not all fun. Rates of depression reach 20% for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work. And as we have always admonished our own children, sex on these terms is destructive of love and marriage.

Here is one simple step colleges can take to reduce both binge drinking and hooking up: Go back to single-sex residences.

I know it’s countercultural. More than 90% of college housing is now co-ed. But Christopher Kaczor at Loyola Marymount points to a surprising number of studies showing that students in co-ed dorms (41.5%) report weekly binge drinking more than twice as often as students in single-sex housing (17.6%). Similarly, students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) to have had a sexual partner in the last year—and more than twice as likely to have had three or more.

Now this is where things get interesting. The religious conservative people don’t like students drinking, hooking up, and getting depressed. Who could possibly be in favor of hurting women?

Well, consider this article in the College Fix.

Excerpt:

Now John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University, is suing CUA for discrimination.

Banzhaf filed a complaint with the Washington D.C. Human Rights Office alleging that the university had violated D.C.’s Human Rights Act. CUA lawyers met with Banzhaf at the Human Rights Office on September 15 to defend the university’s decision.

Banzhaf, who has a history of using lawsuits to fight against what he sees as discrimination, compared the university’s decision to separate students by sex to separating them by religion or race.  He specifically linked the single-sex dorm policy to the “separate but equal” racial policy in place in the U.S. before civil rights movement.

He also told CUA’s student newspaper, The Tower, that the decision is “the same as saying that since Muslims and Jews don’t get along we should force them to live apart.”

What’s behind the push to make women drink and hook-up with men? Feminism.

What feminism says, in practice, is that men have no special duties when compared to women. To say that men have anything special that they are responsible for is to be “sexist”. Therefore, men and women have to be lumped together from kindergarten to college graduation so that they can be identical in every way. Anything less would be “discrimination”.

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Commentary

Many professional women spend their 20s getting drunk and having “fun”

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Dina sends me this depressing article from the UK Daily Mail. This is a must-read.

Excerpt:

The street smells of urine and lager, police struggle  to break up a fight outside the Walkabout bar and a paramedic bundles a comatose girl on to a wheelchair. But it’s a quiet night for 20-year-old Naomi Jenkins. She has ‘only’ drunk three shots of peach schnapps, cider and three shots of Jagermeister (during a drinking game called I Have Never) and still feels ‘a bit sober’. Her friend Hannah Freeman, 19, was punched in a fight and stumbles about swearing and searching for a bathroom.

‘We only do embarrassing things when we’re really drunk,’ Naomi says. ‘I kiss random men in the street and Hannah has had sex behind a chicken coop.’ She screams with laughter as Hannah lurches unsteadily in the stairwell of Charleston Bar and Grill on Caroline Street (known locally as Chip Alley) and unashamedly urinates in front of us.

Amazingly, none of the 80-strong throng of passers-by seems to notice – or perhaps care. Hannah rearranges her minuscule dress, steps over her own urine, shouts ‘f*** off’ and the pair stumble back to Walkabout. It’s only midnight, after all.

[…]But as I found out on the streets of Cardiff after midnight, many of these women are – by day at least – well qualified pillars of the community. Among them I met teachers, nurses, occupational therapists,
personnel professionals and full-time mothers, all determined to shake off responsibility and have fun in the only way they know how. By getting ‘smashed’.

Every week, the ritual is the same: Groups of between four and six girls congregate to dress up and competitively drink bottles of cheap wine or sickly shots. Competition ramps up over who can wear the tiniest mini-dress, the highest heels or the reddest lipstick. Drinking carries on during the bus ride to Cardiff (many young women travel from the surrounding Valleys) and continues in bars between 9pm and 11pm, or until they feel bold enough to dance.

Condom in purse and telephone number for a pre-booked 3am taxi in handbag, they stagger between nightclubs. The ritual continues long into the morning when, dulled by hangovers, they congregate for McDonald’s or fried breakfasts to giggle about the drunken ‘fun’.

New figures show that alcohol misuse costs the nation £7.3 billion in crime and antisocial behaviour and that one woman in five drinks at levels hazardous to health (more than 14 units each week).

I went looking for the answer to the real question: Why? In a series of raw but illuminating interviews, I discovered that beyond the superficial bravado, their nights of booze-fuelled excess make them anything but happy – but they still have no intention of changing. Naomi Jenkins is a classroom assistant from Carmarthen and is adamant that downing sickly Jagermeister shots (which she nicknames medicine) is ‘a laugh’.

I hear the same knee-jerk answer again and again. Human-resources administrator Becky Sherlock
from Chepstow tells me: ‘Tomorrow morning, I’ll lift my head off the pillow and think, “Oh s***.” But it’s worth it.’

‘A hangover is the sign of a good night,’ says her friend Danielle Malson, a secondary-school teacher.

What quickly becomes apparent is the ease with which these young women distinguish their responsible weekday personas from their ‘fun’ selves. Naomi easily switches from diligent teaching assistant to Saturday night party girl when she squeezes into a skintight minidress. She tells me: ‘I wouldn’t do this if it affected my work.’

Occupational therapist Sally Baldwin, 24, added: ‘If I bumped into any of my patients or their relatives, I’d hide. It doesn’t give off the right image… But as long as it doesn’t interfere with my work, I’ll carry on.’ By splitting their characters into two personas (professional and social), these young women appear confident that their professional reputations remain unblemished. In their own minds, at least.

‘I just like knowing I haven’t lost my mojo,’ admits a 27-year-old full-time mother, dressed in a skimpy football kit and slumped in a shop doorway on St Mary Street. ‘The world seems a better place when you’re wearing beer goggles.’

[…]It is a sad testimony that obliteration of reality is the highlight of the week for many of these young women. For Alicia Howley, 20, and Lucy Griffiths, both shop assistants, the ritual of dressing up in tight minidresses and wearing lashings of make-up begins at 4.30pm, straight after their Saturday shifts at Matalan.

Lucy says: ‘After a few drinks, you feel like you can do anything. It’s amazing. The only time I usually talk to new people is speaking to customers at work. Alcohol makes me loads more confident… Like the time I had a foursome.’ They laugh.

Read the whole thing, as this is going on with women from late high school right through college, until they are age 35, when they suddenly want to have a baby. And that doesn’t mean they want to get married first. They are happy to conclude from their careful search for Mr. Right during drunken “foursomes” that there are no good men. After all, they are already perfectly suitable for marriage as they are, so if Mr. Right doesn’t come along, then it’s not the woman’s fault. And it’s nothing that a little IVF, day care and public school won’t solve – all taxpayer-funded, of course.

This story makes me think about why men like me (chaste, and marriage minded) are in the situation that we are in today. I have been taking some flak from friends of both sexes about my reticence to try to get married. I think that people who are criticizing need to realize what is out there right now to choose from. This is what is normal for most women who go through college today. And even if I could find a girl who managed to stay chaste while getting herself mature and independent, the laws are being made by the majority of women, who are more like the ones in the article.

Even when people mouth the words “I’m a Christian” you have to understand that most people who claim to be Christians go through 15 years of church and learn nothing at all that is useful about Christianity. I understand that once women become aware of what men like me want, that they are able to do it and to see the reasons for doing it. But it’s very difficult to convince women to be serious about things like economics and apologetics these days – many of them aren’t being serious about preparing for marriage in the time that they should be doing that.

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