Last month a single friend of mine gave birth, having declared her intention to raise her child alone. She hasn’t been abandoned by the father and nor, fortunately, was the conception the result of rape or domestic abuse; it was as a result of artificial insemination by donor (AID), and performed at an assisted fertilisation clinic that was only too happy to take her money without being overly concerned about the child’s future feelings on the matter. My friend is the fifth woman, I know, to have taken the same course during the past few years. I’m immensely sad for their fatherless children.
My friend’s child is one of 50,000 births registered each year in the UK where the space for the father’s name is left blank and, although legislation has recently been enacted to ensure that both parents register births, there is no practical way of insisting single women do so.
Child’s right
My friend’s child can find out who donated the sperm only when she turns 18 (16 if her birth had been registered in Scotland). Children have a right to know who their father is, and, where at all possible, to forge a relationship with him. For a woman deliberately to have children alone is astonishingly selfish. Many children miss out on having a father through death, abandonment or other unforeseeable circumstances, but this is deliberate deprivation and treats the child merely as the mother’s chattel. My friends would argue they have a right to bear a child, but what about their children’s right to know their fathers?
This is not an attack on single parents; my own mother became one after my father abandoned us. But he was part of my life for 12 years and I have had that most basic human need — to know who I am and where half my DNA comes from — satisfied. I know, for example, that my eye colour, height and nose shape come from him, and who all my relatives are on his side. My friends’ children, however, will have to wait until they’re adults to discover these fundamentally important facts about their genetic and emotional make-up.
{{/usCountry}}This is not an attack on single parents; my own mother became one after my father abandoned us. But he was part of my life for 12 years and I have had that most basic human need — to know who I am and where half my DNA comes from — satisfied. I know, for example, that my eye colour, height and nose shape come from him, and who all my relatives are on his side. My friends’ children, however, will have to wait until they’re adults to discover these fundamentally important facts about their genetic and emotional make-up.
{{/usCountry}}Broken hearts
Although no official figures exist, research tells us that a majority of adopted children make an attempt to trace their birth parents, and most do so during their childbearing years, which suggests a desire not to inflict their pain on another generation. Many of us will have witnessed the searing hurt that an adopted child has experienced when all attempts to trace one or both birth parents have come to naught.
Nor is this a quality-of-parenting issue. Single parents often do a superb job in difficult circumstances and only a fool would suggest a child of two gay parents is loved any less than one with a mum and dad, whether or not they are cohabiting. But however much one or two women may love a child, none of them is a father.
So selfish
We wring our hands over the ‘crisis’ in parenting — whether it’s feckless fathers or women who supposedly have children in order to obtain benefits — but in denying her child half her parentage, surely my friend is being equally selfish by putting her “right” to have a child before any responsibility to its future emotional wellbeing.
The Guardian