LARA CARTER has slept with 20 strangers in the past year – in a desperate and reckless bid to get pregnant.
[…]Lara, an assistant office manager, says: “This is absolutely the right time for me to have a baby and nothing is going to stand in my way.
“All my friends have babies and I desperately want to be a mum.
“I don’t have a steady boyfriend and feel my time to have a baby is running out. I only need a man to provide his sperm – I would have no interest in seeing him again. That is why I’m a sperm hunter.”
Her obsession with getting pregnant started a year ago, when she attended the birth of a friend’s baby.
She says: “The moment I saw my friend hold her newborn child, I had a huge desire to feel that love too.
[…]She says: “First, I check if I’m ovulating… I meet some friends at a bar and instantly start looking for potential sperm donors.
“When I find a potential sperm donor, I get their first name and ask if they have any STDs. If they haven’t and we end up spending the night together, I’ll sneak out in the morning.
“When I don’t want to spend the whole night with a man, I’ll get the deed over and done with before I go home. I’ve had sex in some unusual places, including a car and even nightclub toilets.
“Obviously, I encourage them to have unprotected sex, but some men want to use a condom.
“If they do, I always have one that I have pre-pricked in my handbag. That way the sex isn’t a waste of time.”
[…]Most people are very honest when asked if they have an STD. I trust my instincts.”
Lara has already spent hundreds of pounds on baby clothes.
She says: “Whenever I see a lovely baby outfit, I have to buy it for my future child.
“I’ve also chosen the names my children will have. They will be Tilly and James or Matthew. I also take pregnancy vitamins, even though they are expensive.
Lara admits her yearning for a baby is made worse by her circle of 20 close female friends – 17 of them have had children.
She says: “I look at my friends with envy and know I would make such a good mum. They know about my quest to be a mother and support what I’m doing.
“However, I haven’t told my family, and am worried about their reaction. I’m happy to be a single mother and I wouldn’t want anything to do with the father.
“My parents are still together, so I didn’t grow up in a single-parent family, but plenty of people do it these days. I have plenty of savings to give a baby a loving, well-rounded home and lots of friends close by who can babysit. I have it all planned out.”
She adds: “When I do get pregnant after a one-night stand, I won’t contact the father… I want a baby, not a man.
Single mother Tracey Turner, 26… currently receives £136.50 a week in benefits, which includes £42.50 income support and £94 child tax credit.
On top of this, her local council pays all of her £161-a-week rent and gives her a hefty discount on local rates.
A British pound is worth about $1.60 USD. 300 pounds a week x 52 weeks = 15500 pounds = about $25000 USD per year in benefits, not including the “hefty discount on local rates”. Local rates = local tax rates.
I think what is the most interesting is analyzing the parts of the first article that I have bolded. It tells a story about what is causing this woman to act this way, and what she thinks about herself, her relationships with others, and about the purpose of her life. Keep in mind that this is not unusual – the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the United States is 40%.
I found this post on RuthBlog, which discusses an article from the centrist Manhattan Institute on artificial insemination and single motherhood. It’s by Kay Hymowitz, who I agree with on many things, but not everything. This article was fairly good and it forms a good platform for me to make some comments below on the notion of “a woman’s right to choose”.
What are feminist scholars writing about artificial insemination?
Kay writes:
AI’s potential for deconstructing the family has not been lost on radical feminists. In Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination Is Changing the World, Amy Agigian, a sociology professor at Suffolk University in Boston, observes: “Lesbian appropriation of medical technology (AI) that was intended to shore up nuclear families” has “radically challenge[d] the power structure, assumptions, and presumed ‘naturalness’ of major social institutions.” AI promotes a “postmodern family form that emphasizes affinity over biology and (patri)lineage.” For thinkers like Agigian, one of AI’s greatest benefits is that it dethrones what Canadian feminist Kathryn Pauly Morgan calls PIVMO (penis in vagina with male orgasm). Postmodern anthropologists studying reproduction technology—and there are enough of them to be producing a steady stream of volumes with titles like Conceiving the New World Order—have joined in, arguing that the whole idea of kinship based on sexual procreation is a Western construct, happily on its way out.
Highly credentialed mainstream experts are also taking a take-’em-or-leave-’em approach to dads. There was Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach’s infamous “Deconstructing the Essential Father,” a 1999 American Psychologist article arguing that “neoconservative social scientists” who cautioned against the fatherless family simply wanted to uphold “male power and privilege.” More recently, Peggy Drexler, an assistant professor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and a board member of New York University’s Child Study Center, has made a similar case in Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men. Drexler announces that she herself is raising two children with her husband of 30-plus years, but one has to wonder whether her book isn’t a silent cry for help. Her index under “fathers” includes: “absent, after divorce,” “destructive qualities of,” “spending limited time with children.” “In our society, often we idealize and elevate the role of father in a boy’s life without giving credence to the fact that actual fathers can be destructive and a boy may be better off without his father,” she informs us. In Drexler’s view (spoiler alert for Mr. Drexler), dadless boys are actually better, more sensitive and more “exceptional.”
Keep in mind that research like this is taxpayer-funded – aspiring fathers who are busy working and saving for families they will struggle to support are paying the salaries and scholarships of these feminist scholars. And the research of these feminist scholars becomes the basis of policies like the one being pushed by Sue Leather in the UK, to provide taxpayer-funded artificial insemination to any woman who wants to have a child.
But what do ordinary women think of artificial insemination?
Kay explains:
More ordinary “choice mothers,” as many single women using AI now call themselves, are usually not openly hostile to fathers, but they boast a language of female empowerment that implicitly trivializes men’s roles in children’s lives. The term “choice mothers” frames AI as a matter of women’s reproductive rights. Only the woman’s decision making—or intention—carries moral weight. Similarly, advocates often cite the benefits of single motherhood’s freedom from “donor interference.” “Single moms avoid the need to discuss and negotiate around key parenting issues,” one Toronto social worker told iParenting Media. “She can shape a child in her own unique vision.”
And in the same choice-trumps-everything spirit, choice mothers emphasize that they choose their kids. All the planning and deliberation that they’ve got to go through to have children, they suggest, might make them better parents than those who just “breed.” Their kids are “wanted children,” observes sociologist Judith Stacey. The implication that sexual intercourse brings forth hordes of unwanted, unloved children, while AI produces a chosen elite, sometimes hangs in the air.
As you know we have tons of statistics showing that children raised without a father suffer enormously. But now some people seem to be saying that a woman has a right to choose to have a baby who will grow up without a father.
Well, what is a woman’s right to choose, really? It seems to be used in a lot of scenarios. It’s a woman’s right to choose to kill an unborn child, which has happened over 40 million times in the United States so far. It’s also a woman’s right to choose to destroy her child’s future by depriving that child of a father. It’s a woman’s right to choose to have drunken hook-up pre-marital sex with scores of promiscuous alpha males who have no ability or willingness to be husbands or fathers. It’s a woman’s right to choose to unilaterally divorce a man she freely committed to love for life, so she can steal his house and much of his future income. It’s a woman’s right to choose to work full-time and to abandon her children to day care and schools that discriminate against boys. It’s a woman’s right to choose to have sex with a man (or several men), then to accuse him (or them) of rape because she doesn’t want her reputation ruined. It’s a woman’s right to put on weight after marriage, and then to have her husband arrested for “verbal abuse” when he asks her to slim down. And so on.
That article caused me to think a lot about that phrase “a woman’s right to choose”. And it seems to me that there is a common core to the examples of a woman’s right to choose that I listed above. What the phrase really means is that a woman has a right to choose to selfishly pursue her own happiness regardless of the effects on the people who love her and depend on her. It also means that a woman should never be judged or held accountable for the destruction she causes. And it also means she can offload the financial costs of her own choices onto taxpayers who have no choice but to pay for the damage she causes. And it also means she can blame men for all of the obvious and predictable consequences of her own selfish and irrational behavior.
And how do men respond to this? Well, men know that marriage requires both partners to love each other and the children unselfishly. Men know that marriage is about two people growing to be less selfish and less irresponsible. And so women who believe in “a woman’s right to choose” are not qualified to marry or raise children. And this is why men do not commit to marriage any more. We would like to marry, and raise children. But we can’t find anyone suitable for marriage. And even if we found a decent unmarried woman from the 23% who did not vote for Obama, there is the feminist state – courts, schools, etc. – to contend with, which is firmly committed to “a woman’s right to choose”. The government has enormous power to regulate men, marriage and parenting – so there is really no hope at all. Men will have to wait until women come to their senses and stop voting to replace men with the government.
UPDATE: The public-funding of invitro fertilization is happening faster than I thought, at least in the UK. Check out this article from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via Head Noises)
Jeff Dolan spent Father’s Day in jail, locked away for failure to pay child support. Deadbeat dads don’t garner a lot of sympathy. But you don’t need to study Jeff’s case for long before you realize that he’s anything but a deadbeat. Instead, he’s a man hopelessly ensnared in a crushing bureaucratic machine: He’s in jail because he couldn’t pay child support, but he couldn’t pay child support because he was unemployed … and he was unemployed because the court took his driver’s license for failure to pay child support … after he went bankrupt paying his court costs.
[…]Courts, in their earnest efforts to do right by families, are destroying them, instead. Men, who want only the chance to be good fathers, are crushed under the weight of gender-biased default rulings and the inertia of unfeeling bureaucracies. Whether in far-off Minnesota or, as Post columnist Barbara Kay has shown time and again, right here in Canada, men fighting custody battles are outgunned from the start. Jeff’s story, of being forced into bankruptcy by family court proceedings and then being jailed by those same courts for not being able to pay their court-mandated payments, is no surprise to any number of Canadian dads.
Bill Levy, a Canadian with bitter personal experience in such matters said it best: “Canada has reopened debtor prisons, only for parents. Only alienated parents go to jail for poverty. No Mastercard or mortgage debtors. The Constitution does not permit this, we can’t be forced into servitude. And yet no one will stand up in court and make these arguments. Men, and some women, too, can’t fight back against the court’s preference for expediency.” That mirrors what Jeff’s brother Jon told me in a phone interview: “Jeff isn’t in jail because he’s an abuser or a bad father. He’s in jail because he’s poor in a bad economy where there are no jobs.”
About 45% of first marriages end in divorce, with women initiating about 70% of divorces and getting full custody about 90% of the time. False accusations are regularly used by the person who initiates the divorce in order to get restraining orders and de facto custody of the children, and the child support payments that go with them. It is a massive transfer of wealth from men to women at gunpoint, and a massive loss of liberty for men.
People keep expecting men to step up and take on the role of husband and father, but when the chips are down, 77% of young unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and his policies of destroying the economy. A job is a requirement for men to marry and to take on the role of husband and father. Not only are the schools and universities biased against men, but the industries where men dominate have also been hit hardest by the recession.
We need to spend less time on fashionable causes like environmentalism, gun control, pacifism, animal rights and universal health care, and more time on economics. It’s men who have the most to lose emotionally and financially from a divorce. Not only that, but women commit domestic violence against men at rates equal to men, but the laws (e.g. – VAWA) don’t recognize the truth. The vast majority of the social programs are for women only.
A good start would be to read this summary of the divorce courts by Stephen Baskerville, and also listen to the Dr. Morse lecture on marriage. Either we are going to encourage men to marry and praise them for marrying or we are going to discourage them and then blame them for not marrying. Men respond to incentives. As long as society as a whole chooses to remain ignorant of the facts and chooses to continue to blame men, men won’t marry.
WINTERY KNIGHT 