What About the Children?
Kay Hymowitz points out the sad case of a Kansas court essentially deeming fatherless two twins who were fathered by a sperm donor -- despite the fact that the father wants to participate in the upbringing of his own children!
Disgraceful. As Hymowitz puts it,
aided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family.
This may work just fine for the women who want babies without hassles or men who want to collect a little money on the side for providing their genetic material. But what about the only truly innocent parties in this whole "transaction": the children?
Disgraceful. As Hymowitz puts it,
aided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family.
This may work just fine for the women who want babies without hassles or men who want to collect a little money on the side for providing their genetic material. But what about the only truly innocent parties in this whole "transaction": the children?
posted by LadybugUSA at 7:48 AM
1 Comments:
What about the children? The children have the right to an intact family of the parents who chose to have them, NOT the confusion and chaos of shared custody with someone who happens to share their genes but is not a member of their family. With your logic, all parents who give their kids up for adoption should share custody with the adoptive parents. That is utterly wrong.
Infertile couples and their children created with the help of anonymous sperm donors have the legal right not to have a stranger interfere with their families.
You are suggesting that a family with an infertile husband who chose a sperm donor be forced to endure 18 years of interference by the "real" father.
Likewise, women who choose to have children without a male partner don't sign up for decades of "marriage" to a sperm donor either.
Oh, you only care if the parents are women. If you hate lesbians that much, don't pretend your concern is that the children have a "dad". The children's parents are the couple who is raising them, not a stranger who signed away his legal rights.
I donated my embryos left over from IVF to an infertile couple. My family does not expect the right to make decisions for those children or have legal visitation rights just because we helped another family have children. No donor has, or should have, that expectation. If the real parents who are raising the children wish to allow the donor and child to meet -- and most do -- that is their choice, not our right.
Children know their families are "real" whether or not their parents had help cretaing them. Why don't you know that?
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