I am really curious to hear what you all think about this article from the NY Times that I read today: Wanted: A Few Good Sperm. It's about single women who choose to have children via sperm donors. You might need to create a login to read it. It's a lengthy article, but it is fascinating.
My first reaction was my gut screaming at me that this was wrong, wrong, WRONG! It's another evidence of family disintegration and the objectification of children. Firstly, I would never ever in a million years want to be a single mother. I find parenthood plenty challenging with two of us on deck. I would go nuts if it was just me! Not to mention the numerous moral (or immoral) issues here.
Eventually, I settled down enough to ask myself, "But what if I were single and I really, really, really wanted to experience pregnancy and have children?" I still wouldn't do it. I believe there is a requisite sequence that is being totally disregarded - marriage FIRST, (then physical intimacy,) THEN children.
I am really interested in hearing other comments on this article, though. Please share, even if you don't usually comment here. It's ok to disagree, as long as we can be civil about it.
13 comments:
right on man, right on.
I only skimmed through the article, but there was a very similar article in The Atlantic last year (or so) that I am quite familiar with.
As it is unlikely I will ever be married, this is actually something I have considered. I ultimately decided it wasn't for me (ultimately, the major reason came down to me not feeling it was right for me); however, I'm not strongly opposed to the idea for others who go that route. (In case you're wondering, the Church strongly recommends against it. This factored into my decision, but wasn't the make or break thing.)
Instead I have decided that I would rather adopt older children, perhaps sibling groups (from my parents' experience and other research, I know there are more couples that want to adopt infants than infants to adopt - unless you pursue foreign adoptions, which is very costly - so I will leave the infant adoption to couples). Unfortunately, I have done nothing about this besides a lot of research. If I do this, I need to do it soon. I believe it to be right for me.
Tanya, thanks for your comments. Wow, you surprised me. I'd like to hear more about why you want to adopt, if you feel like sharing. It seems like it would be so, so, so hard to be a single parent. When I was single, and contemplating the possibility of a single future, having children as a never crossed my mind. Travel and fun jobs - those were my thoughts.
If we think only about the child's welfare, then the main argument in favor of this kind of process is the same argument used in favor of supporting adoption by gay couples: isn't it better to have a great single parent or great gay parents than being in a bad "traditional" family? The answer to that is - clearly - Yes. But it's much more defensible with adoption than with insemination. With adoption, the kid is alive and you can make a guess that if she isn't adopted, then she'll be in this public system which is likely to be worse than any half-loving family, traditional or not. With insemination (if you believe that kids come from some pre-earth world, as Mormons do), then you have no idea what kind of family the kid would otherwise get "assigned" to and you actually can't make the same claim that the kid is getting a "better" home.
What remains, then, is whether one believes that "traditional" homes are better for kids than "non-traditional" homes. If you really don't think so, then insemination could be just as good as a man and a woman having a baby. If you do think so, then not.
Well, conversely, Dave, if you can't make the argument that the home will be better than one they might otherwise have been assigned to, you also can't make the argument that the child is getting a worse home. It's a variation of an argument from ignorance.
Moreover, this all hinges on apocryphal notions in LDS theology, such as the possibility that "assignment" to one's earth family is somehow mutable. If you accept foreordination of family assignment, then you would also have to accept that spirit was meant in the preexistence to come to that single parent home via insemination.
Indeed, the fact remains that history has shown no lack of marital couples who indeed make worse parents than single parents, and vice versa, so I'm not sure it's a valid line of argument to particularize the generalization to these individuals.
Myself, I also would like a child of my own regardless of the fact that, like Tanya, I seriously doubt I'll ever marry.
Dave and Craig, thanks for your comments. I think when making comparisons, it's important to compare best to best. Is it better to have a great traditional mom/dad/kids family or better to have a great dad/dad/kids family or great mom/kids family? I believe that the traditional family is best. It's been the plan from the beginning.
Having not been a single parent, I am not speaking from any experience other than that of a married parent. I hope never to be a single parent. It is very challenging to be a parent. Doing it alone seems almost impossible to me. I know people do it because of circumstances but I would never recommend that anyone do it by choice.
It seems that any single parent who chooses to have a child (whether by adoption or any other means) will be putting that child in daycare for at least 8 hours a day. Which to me seems somewhat pointless. Why go through all the trouble and expense of having a child to hand it over to someone else to take care of?
One aspect of the article that horrified me was the glimpse into the dating life of singles in New York. The article quotes Keryn, a woman seeking insemination from a sperm donor, as saying, "People in New York change sex partners quicker than the crosstown bus." I was shocked by the attitudes I read about. I wonder if those are the prevailing attitudes, the norm.
What is the prevailing attitude about family?
Since I know one of the women featured in the article, I thought I'd chime in. Shelby is a Christian Scientist with much faith. Her decision to become a single mom involved much meditation and prayer. Both of her parents are deceased and she doesn't have any siblings. She is very concerned about family values, which is why she's having a second child, so Christopher can
have a brother.
In fact it is because she values family so much that she decided to have Christopher in the first place. It is the only family she believes she will ever have, and she counts herself incredibly blessed to have the resources and the physical ability to do this. Both of her children have been born to
her after 40, using a method of fertilization that is difficult for women of any age.
The fact she was able to have a child at all is a miracle.
Laura, thanks for your comments. I had to go back to the article to re-read about Shelby, so I'm including the part from the article about her. Reading about her a second time helped me to make more sense of her determination that the second child not be fathered by her boyfriend - it was to give her first child a complete sibling with the same parents.
Over thanksgiving vacation, I took the train to Darien, Conn., to meet Shelby Siems and her 2-year-old son, Christopher, who had driven down from their home in Marblehead, Mass. Shelby, 44, grew up in Darien and had come to visit cousins and friends over the holiday weekend. She is part of a rising number of single mothers who are having second children; when we met in Connecticut, she was four months pregnant with a second son by the same donor who sired her first. She and Christopher picked me up at the train station, and we drove to a nearby pizza restaurant that was still quiet at that midmorning hour. Shelby is fair, with long blond hair and pale blue eyes that are prone to tears. Christopher is also pale, a watchful, intelligent child with wispy reddish hair. At lunch, he said "please" and "thank you" and rolled a small green train engine over the laminated tabletop while Shelby and I talked. For a 2-year-old he was remarkably patient, but occasionally he cried, "Mama, Mama, I want to hold you."
"I'm right here," Shelby said.
Once a journalist for The Christian Science Monitor, Shelby was finishing up an M.F.A. in nonfiction. Her thesis project is a book about her experience as a single mother, an experience that has been more grueling than Daniela's or Karyn's will most likely be because Shelby has no immediate family; she was an only child of older parents who died by the time she reached her early 30's. She inherited money that has allowed her to go back to school and to support Christopher, but she is alone in the world. In Christopher's first weeks of life, there were periods of many days when they saw no one but each other.
Shelby does have a boyfriend: a 52-year-old bachelor who works at a pharmaceutical company, whom she met at a party when Christopher was a month old. "He's been a great person in my life and Christopher's life, but he's not going to marry me," she explained over the phone when we first spoke. "Some people just don't want to do that, and he's one of those people."
The fact that Shelby is in a relationship at all is unusual; the majority of mothers I spoke with — even those with older children — had remained single. Many expressed a willingness to date if the opportunity were to come along, but they work long hours to support their kids, and when they're not working, they want to see them. For all the comparisons between being divorced with children and having them alone, there are critical differences: an ex-husband who spends any time at all with his kids frees up pockets of time when a woman could potentially see someone new. Even minimal child-support payments would reduce the financial burden on her, and substantial ones could allow her to work less. Perhaps most important, a child with only one parent is immensely dependent on that parent, and the mother of such a child tends to feel her responsibility acutely. It can be painful — and expensive — to leave your child with a baby sitter after a whole day away, just to go out on a date.
Despite her age — Shelby was 42 when Christopher was born — she was determined that her son have a sibling. "He has even less of a family than I do, because he doesn't have his whole father's side of the family," she told me. "The only person he has is me." She wanted to use the same donor again and put the matter to her boyfriend, who made it clear that he wasn't interested in fatherhood. She began stocking up on the donor's sperm (most banks keep a reserve supply of each donor's sperm for women who want second children) when Christopher was still an infant. "I want my son to have a full sibling," she said. "I want to feel like he has one person in the world who is a complete blood relative after I'm gone. I did not want my son to feel deprived, that the other sibling had a father and he didn't." To be sure that there was no chance the child would be his, Shelby and her boyfriend were celibate for the year it took her to conceive, which she finally did at 43, after eight tries, using I.V.F.
I’ve been thinking about sperm/egg donation for a while because I get reminded of it each time I see the classified ads in the school paper. Sperm banks/ egg donor clinics advertise in school papers in order to target a vulnerable population, namely college students under financial pressures to pay tuition. Students desperate to pay tuition are lured in by slogans such as “your sperm can earn” and “Egg donors needed- substantial financial compensation” The ads focus on the gametes as an impersonal commodity. From my point of view, this is unethical because it pushes to the background an important fact. Because these gametes are going to be used for the purpose of procreation, the donor’s actions are tantamount, in most cases, to selling their children. Slogans like “Need tuition: Sell us your first child” are never seen in the paper. I wish they were more honest about it because students in desperate financial straits don’t tend to think in these terms but ought to be reminded of the real ramification of their choice to “donate”.
In reality the term “donate” is a misnomer in this context because it really isn’t donation. It is a sale. Built into the term donor is the presupposition/connotation that this is charitable. Altruism does not seem to be a motivating factor in sperm/egg donation. These are few reasons why.
In order for this transaction to function the anonymous gamete provider must :
1. Be ambivalent as to who will be raising their biological children. As far as I know, there is no way of screening potential purchasers.
2. Not feel a responsibility to provide materially to the upbringing of their children.
3. In the case of anonymous sales, place their own interest in anonymity above their child’s potential desire to know his or her true parentage.
The gamete trade flies in the face of a basic principle of society which is that both parents are responsible for their offspring. Parenthood on the part of the anonymous gamete provider is reduced to one-time financial transaction to fulfill an immediate need.
If we do allow ourselves to accept this form of trade as a legal alternative to adoption, we must ask ourselves the following question: If we have laws against selling children for the purpose of adoption why is it that we can sell gametes that can be used to create children? The way I see it, selling gametes is an exploitative but legal form of human trafficking.
Am a bit late but here is my 2 cents!
I am a Christian who was from the great traditional family...then one of my parents died. I went from being in the idealistic family to the only offspring of a single parent in my area - my surviving parent did a FABULOUS JOB, decided not date, to devote 100% to making sure I had a wonderful, stable homelife.
So I guess my views have a different understanding.
To top that off I am a foster parent. Yes I agree you can not compare the bad with the great, but again it makes me look at what makes a good parent? In my opinion this is what I have found (in no order)
- the ability to put your children's needs before your own
- the ability to create a loving, stable atmosphere
- TIME (big one here, my surviving parent decided only to work part time, was there to take me to school and back every single day. We made sacrifices to be able to do this (i.e. no trips to Disney) but many of my friends had stay at home mom's who golfed every evening and went to the cottages without them at the weekends. My two best friends will say hand on heart that from age 16 they have never spent one weekend with their parents!!!).
- Emotional support (faith, ability to see your child's emotional needs etc)
- Financial stability - kids don't need everything, but they need food, clothes, not to hear about constant money worries. I have good Christian friends who say unless you can provide a good detached house with garden etc you should not have a child - because you should be able to provide a proper home before you even think about having a child, how many good parents wouldn't have children? Because you live in an apartment does it not mean you can't be a good mom or dad?
There has been so much research on what is 'best' for kids. I have been lucky enough to be a part of much of that research and there are key themes that come out; stability, belonging, love, healthy attachment and relationships, proper opportunities for age appropriate development, time with permanent caregiver etc. So much comes down to more that whether you are single or not.
There are over 2 million children in the world with no parents - I urge people to go and volunteer in those orphanages and refugee camps and then talk about what children really need.
Our church often quotes the words of God when counselling around starting a family
Jesus said 'I call upon all committed Christians to take care of widows and orphans in their distress'. Someone once asked whether single women wanting children are being selfish - okay, to an extent everyone who wants a child is being selfish - so let's leave the judgement out of it.
Instead let's focus on those millions of children who have no one instead...
K.
On a rare morning not in Church I would like to say the following:
I know MANY Christian couples who have done years of sperm washing, IVF, embryo selection, egg/donor sperm and then have a lot to say when a single decides to create a family. They themselves had no problem creating/destroying embryo's or rejecting a baby for domestic adoption because it was a boy instead of a girl etc. I think there is a bigger argument than just whether someone is single or not.
I am currently a Christian single and would NOT go down the sperm donor route but would adopt the many children that need loving, Christian homes. By focusing on a constant argument about whether singles should or shouldn't be a parent we are missing a much bigger picture. Why is it that everyone (singles and non singles) is obsessed with their own biology instead of following God's example and embrasing children. I think all this banter on single parents deflects from the many that do a wonderful job adopting fantastic children who have no one. I personally know many Christian singles who have adopted from the Ukraine, China, US - they adopted many of the children others wouldn't consider (older, abused, from different race/ethnicity). I think that there actions are so much closer to what God meant when he said 'I call upon all Christians to take care of widows and orphans in their distress'...now that, if you call yourself a Christian, should be food for thought/prayer.
Thank you, everyone, for your thoughtful and insightful comments. I appreciate this "conversation" and have learned a lot. And if anyone has more to add, please feel free to do so.
I too know many Christian couples who have had IVF and distroyed life without a thought and yet question singles?! Hello?? As adoptive parents we see more singles who embrase the Lord's word through adoption than we do of Christian couple friends who spend years using donors (of course most people don't know this) and if they finally decide to adopt, they only want a caucasian newborn. Where in the Bible is that found? The Bible I read says that we should, if we are committed Christians, take care of orphans in their distress.
I think true Christians should stop picking on single people and instead look at their own lives and think about why they are not opening their homes to over 168 million orphans that exist in our world. Also as our pastor would say 'If Jesus were here today, he would be helping the single mom's, the people on drugs and the people in need, not sitting in Church on a Sunday in his Sunday best'!
I also think that we need to stop seeing adoption as only an option for those with infertility, the Bible calls us all, not just those unable to have biological children.
Sad how many Christians turn their backs on that one...
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