hm, not necessarily getting oneself knocked up and then raising a kid alone. could be a donor sperm - entirely anonymous. as for the missing biological father - sometimes it's never an issue, is it? it isn't always. but yes, of course I have my reservations on deliberate single mothers. I have asked many about this and most would say that it is very selfish and I don't deny it. but it isn't so simple either, wanting a child and then simply getting one. the world is more conservative than we think, and family objections could be enough to deter a woman from trying. but what if it ties in with her entire life philosophy? what if she has tried looking for men - or not looking but had fallen deeply in love before, but lost it? what if, she has a well-paying career to financially support the child, and that she is mature enough to know that she is ready to raise a child, but there is just no darn mr husband?
as for gay couples, I have even less of an issue with them. adopting is one thing, but just like many heterosexual couples, surely they have similar desires to have biological offspring (from one or the other partner). a donor sperm or egg does it well. the question of the unknown biological parent would arise just as much an adopted child would question his/her biological parents.
heh I am probably not making any sense - am absolutely exhausted, and I should craft a better reply... still, the above article did articulate something I have harboured in me, not necessarily meaning that I would want to make it happen, but it's there, in my mind. just, maybe. BIG maybe.
I think that we're approaching this from different philosophical POVs. You say:
what if it ties in with her entire life philosophy? what if she has tried looking for men - or not looking but had fallen deeply in love before, but lost it? what if, she has a well-paying career to financially support the child, and that she is mature enough to know that she is ready to raise a child, but there is just no darn mr husband?
Your view is that if someone's position in life ticks all the right boxes (salary, maturity, etc.) that person (or couple) deserves to have a baby if they want it hard enough.
My view is that a (biological) baby is not a right. Even married heterosexual couples sometimes can't conceive, as much as they would love to -- you can't force nature, and that's very hard sometimes but you just have to accept it.
What is more important here is the right of the child to know his/her biological parents, and to be born to them -- not the supposed "right" of an adult to have a baby like he/she would buy a pet.
you're very right! in response to this comment and the one below, I can only say that the world shall have to wait with bated breath on the outcome of this. there is no denying that there will be more women who choose to have children without fathers.
also, I agree with you that every child should have the right to know his/her biological parents and I can see the need for it... but the 'forcing nature' bit, hm, I have some issues with that (does IVF count as non-biological? strictly speaking, it is). can I also infer that you don't think gay couples should have their own biological children either? just curious.
your friends who are adopted: are they angsty that their biological parents are somewhere out there? again, another question asked out of curiosity.
well, I'll be sure to speak to you again if ever the time comes when I want to have a child - but with no partner.
does IVF count as non-biological? strictly speaking, it is)
IVF, if it uses both parents' egg and sperm, is biological. But sometimes you have donor egg/sperm so of course then it's not, lah. I am opposed to IVF on other grounds, but not because it introduces a "third parent" into the relationship.
can I also infer that you don't think gay couples should have their own biological children either?
What do you mean by "their own"? Any child that one of them sires/births is not going to be the biological child of BOTH of them. So the child is going to wonder who the mother is (if it's a guy couple) or the dad (if it's a lesbian couple). So, what do you think my answer would be? :-)
your friends who are adopted: are they angsty that their biological parents are somewhere out there?
Of the three cases I know best:
1) My neighbours bought two baby girls from China, who are now around 12/13 yrs old -- I don't know if their adoptive parents have told them yet. So, can't say yet.
2) My ex-schoolmate adopted 4 siblings from overseas cos she was told their parents were dead. Turned out they are alive, and now in touch (messy child-trafficking case, now happily resolved) -- the parents are poor, so agreed to let them stay with adoptive parents so that kids would have better future -- now THAT is a far better example of kevlars's "parental self-sacrifice" than what he cited). I don't know how often they see their children, I think rarely.
3) A friend's dad was adopted by his mum's spinster sister (I love the way our grandparents used to pass around kids because some had too many, some wanted a boy/girl, etc). Erm no angst here, because the dad was v grateful to his adoptive mum for raising him (plus he knew exactly who his birth-mum was and she was quite a nightmare!).
the question of the unknown biological parent would arise just as much an adopted child would question his/her biological parents.
That's totally true. But the difference is that an adopted child knows that some horrid circumstance (death, rape, poverty, etc.) must have happened to one or both of his birth parents for him to be given up for adoption. And because he was already born, someone had to take care of him -- and the adopters stepped in.
Whereas a child born of donor egg/sperm knows that his parent deliberately set out to conceive him "free" of ties to the other DNA-donor.
I think that -- as much as we try to pretend that blood doesn't matter -- it still affects our sense of belonging in this world at a very primal level.
I have friends who have been adopted, or who are adopted. The adopted kids do have a lot of love for their adopter parents, but they are still conscious that they have 'other parents' out there. Sometimes they accept them, sometimes they reject them, but it is still a tie they cannot escape.
Families don't have to have (i) a father; (ii) a mother; (iii) a kid, to be correct. All this damned propaganda.
I know people who were brought up by grandparents, spinster aunts, half a set of divorced parents, were "accidents", were traded for other children because their "eight characters" weren't ideal, etc, etc, etc.
I don't see any of them being more maladjusted than the rest of us.
Sacrifices are sometimes the clearest measure of love ("For God so loved the world that He gave his only son...") - if a person wants a child, and will love the child, and is willing to go to the additional trouble and considerable expense, and brave the odd looks and unkind gossip et al, then I think that child is dead lucky, to have a parent willing to go through so much just to have him/her.
So what if they're single/ married/ gay/ straight/ neutered/ sterile/ old/ teenaged/ ugly/ gorgeous/ short/ tall/ fat/ scrawny/ dumb/ brilliant/ redneck/ geek/ have B.O.?
(Also - children aren't always put up for adoption due to some "horrid circumstance" - in most cases, the child just wasn't wanted.)
Oh, we're comparing apples with oranges here. Actually, apples with apple-seeds.
What I said was that if you want to raise a child, why not take in an unwanted child (who's already been born)? Why go to the trouble of creating a new life who is going to wonder where the other half of its roots and human history come from? To deny a child that knowledge is a form of great selfishness, a trade-off of (your) biological satisfaction for (your child's) eternal biological uncertainty.
There was a great line in the article above that I sent Reisende -- "It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place."
I'm not quite sure how to go about answering your objections.
Families don't have to have (i) a father; (ii) a mother; (iii) a kid, to be correct. All this damned propaganda.
I know people who were brought up by grandparents, spinster aunts, half a set of divorced parents, were "accidents", were traded for other children because their "eight characters" weren't ideal, etc, etc, etc.
I don't see any of them being more maladjusted than the rest of us.
A family, in its universal meaning, is a group of people related by blood. Grandparents, aunts and cousins are all part of the extended family. And yes, they can sometimes be prevailed upon to take care of members of the extended family (hey! there's that 'f' word again!) as opposed to random strangers off the street.
Your view seems to be that blood relation doesn't matter a damn, but only who YOU personally consider "family" is family.
Looking at the course of human history, where many people have died protecting their own family members, and sacrified a lot for their benefit, it would seem to be a very natural, primal instinct. We do privilege "ours" over "others". This is so obvious that human law has evolved to give it social primacy and protect its intactness, to use this instinct for the betterment of society.
So let's get back to the other thing you took umbrage at, i.e. that Family = father + mother + child.
But my point was that father + mother = child.
How can you have a child, biologically speaking, without a father and a mother? And a child, knowing that he exists, must know that he has a father and a mother. It's very natural to want to seek them out. How else do you explain the hundreds and thousands of adopted/surrogate children searching for their birth parents now that they have grown up? It's scaring the hell out of the sperm donors who never thought (in the 1970s) that trading a few squirts of semen for $25 beer money would come back to haunt them.... Hence the new debate over "right to privacy (for the donor)" vs. "right to know (for the child)".
Also...looking at 20th-century first world human society, it's pretty obvious that non-intact nuclear family (for whatever reason) leads to a higher rate of screwed-up kids. Just read the New Paper...
But that's it. Father + Mother = Child is not really the equation; scientifically speaking (and I didn't take biology), Egg + Sperm = Foetus.
"Father" and "Mother" are social roles, and those roles may theoretically be played out by anyone (the grandparents, the spinster aunts, the surrogate family, the single parent).
Yes, non-intact families lead to more screwed up kids. But I'm looking at substance over form here. If a kid had heterosexual parents who were (i) absent all the time, (ii) fought all the time; and/or (iii) paid him no mind, would he really be better off than a kid with less conventional parents who were around, didn't fight (as much) and/or paid attention?
As for the strength of blood ties, it's true, there's that old cliche about being thicker than water, but there's also the undeniable fact that many people find CNY a right pain in the ****.
I agree that it's natural that an adopted child, or a testtube child, would want to meet his biological "parents". But people do have more than one set of "parents" - divorced parents who both remarry, for instance.
I think the fundamental tangle lies in the equation of parent with DNA donor. It isn't the same thing.
Merriam-Webster defines "parent" as: Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin parent-, parens; akin to Latin "parere", "to give birth to" Date: 15th century
a: one that begets or brings forth offspring b: a person who brings up and cares for another
You are quite right in that I conflate (a) and (b), while you think the two are separable.
I would say that many of the modern social problems we have arise, quite simply, from the fact that we have separated the two. It occasionally happens, for reasons beyond the parents' control, that they are unable to raise their child together. However, to deliberately frustrate this social structure is to invite confusion into the natural order -- and that has consequences beyond the individual.
Thank you for this interesting discussion so far. G'night!
as for gay couples, I have even less of an issue with them. adopting is one thing, but just like many heterosexual couples, surely they have similar desires to have biological offspring (from one or the other partner). a donor sperm or egg does it well. the question of the unknown biological parent would arise just as much an adopted child would question his/her biological parents.
heh I am probably not making any sense - am absolutely exhausted, and I should craft a better reply... still, the above article did articulate something I have harboured in me, not necessarily meaning that I would want to make it happen, but it's there, in my mind. just, maybe. BIG maybe.
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what if it ties in with her entire life philosophy? what if she has tried looking for men - or not looking but had fallen deeply in love before, but lost it? what if, she has a well-paying career to financially support the child, and that she is mature enough to know that she is ready to raise a child, but there is just no darn mr husband?
Your view is that if someone's position in life ticks all the right boxes (salary, maturity, etc.) that person (or couple) deserves to have a baby if they want it hard enough.
My view is that a (biological) baby is not a right. Even married heterosexual couples sometimes can't conceive, as much as they would love to -- you can't force nature, and that's very hard sometimes but you just have to accept it.
What is more important here is the right of the child to know his/her biological parents, and to be born to them -- not the supposed "right" of an adult to have a baby like he/she would buy a pet.
You may want to read this WP article, which made quite an impression on me:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/15/AR2006121501820.html
Cheers!
-Willow
P/S you never told us about Israel trip!
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also, I agree with you that every child should have the right to know his/her biological parents and I can see the need for it... but the 'forcing nature' bit, hm, I have some issues with that (does IVF count as non-biological? strictly speaking, it is). can I also infer that you don't think gay couples should have their own biological children either? just curious.
your friends who are adopted: are they angsty that their biological parents are somewhere out there? again, another question asked out of curiosity.
well, I'll be sure to speak to you again if ever the time comes when I want to have a child - but with no partner.
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IVF, if it uses both parents' egg and sperm, is biological. But sometimes you have donor egg/sperm so of course then it's not, lah. I am opposed to IVF on other grounds, but not because it introduces a "third parent" into the relationship.
can I also infer that you don't think gay couples should have their own biological children either?
What do you mean by "their own"? Any child that one of them sires/births is not going to be the biological child of BOTH of them. So the child is going to wonder who the mother is (if it's a guy couple) or the dad (if it's a lesbian couple). So, what do you think my answer would be? :-)
your friends who are adopted: are they angsty that their biological parents are somewhere out there?
Of the three cases I know best:
1) My neighbours bought two baby girls from China, who are now around 12/13 yrs old -- I don't know if their adoptive parents have told them yet. So, can't say yet.
2) My ex-schoolmate adopted 4 siblings from overseas cos she was told their parents were dead. Turned out they are alive, and now in touch (messy child-trafficking case, now happily resolved) -- the parents are poor, so agreed to let them stay with adoptive parents so that kids would have better future -- now THAT is a far better example of kevlars's "parental self-sacrifice" than what he cited). I don't know how often they see their children, I think rarely.
3) A friend's dad was adopted by his mum's spinster sister (I love the way our grandparents used to pass around kids because some had too many, some wanted a boy/girl, etc). Erm no angst here, because the dad was v grateful to his adoptive mum for raising him (plus he knew exactly who his birth-mum was and she was quite a nightmare!).
Hope this helps.....
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Er, sure. Don't forget, if you're a single mom the govt will only give you 8 weeks maternity leave!
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That's totally true. But the difference is that an adopted child knows that some horrid circumstance (death, rape, poverty, etc.) must have happened to one or both of his birth parents for him to be given up for adoption. And because he was already born, someone had to take care of him -- and the adopters stepped in.
Whereas a child born of donor egg/sperm knows that his parent deliberately set out to conceive him "free" of ties to the other DNA-donor.
I think that -- as much as we try to pretend that blood doesn't matter -- it still affects our sense of belonging in this world at a very primal level.
I have friends who have been adopted, or who are adopted. The adopted kids do have a lot of love for their adopter parents, but they are still conscious that they have 'other parents' out there. Sometimes they accept them, sometimes they reject them, but it is still a tie they cannot escape.
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I know people who were brought up by grandparents, spinster aunts, half a set of divorced parents, were "accidents", were traded for other children because their "eight characters" weren't ideal, etc, etc, etc.
I don't see any of them being more maladjusted than the rest of us.
Sacrifices are sometimes the clearest measure of love ("For God so loved the world that He gave his only son...") - if a person wants a child, and will love the child, and is willing to go to the additional trouble and considerable expense, and brave the odd looks and unkind gossip et al, then I think that child is dead lucky, to have a parent willing to go through so much just to have him/her.
So what if they're single/ married/ gay/ straight/ neutered/ sterile/ old/ teenaged/ ugly/ gorgeous/ short/ tall/ fat/ scrawny/ dumb/ brilliant/ redneck/ geek/ have B.O.?
(Also - children aren't always put up for adoption due to some "horrid circumstance" - in most cases, the child just wasn't wanted.)
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And isn't that a horrid circumstance in iself?
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(a) Unwanted child put up for adoption vs. (b)Wanted testtube kid - I don't understand why you appear to see (a) as better off than (b).
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What I said was that if you want to raise a child, why not take in an unwanted child (who's already been born)? Why go to the trouble of creating a new life who is going to wonder where the other half of its roots and human history come from? To deny a child that knowledge is a form of great selfishness, a trade-off of (your) biological satisfaction for (your child's) eternal biological uncertainty.
There was a great line in the article above that I sent Reisende -- "It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place."
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Families don't have to have (i) a father; (ii) a mother; (iii) a kid, to be correct. All this damned propaganda.
I know people who were brought up by grandparents, spinster aunts, half a set of divorced parents, were "accidents", were traded for other children because their "eight characters" weren't ideal, etc, etc, etc.
I don't see any of them being more maladjusted than the rest of us.
A family, in its universal meaning, is a group of people related by blood. Grandparents, aunts and cousins are all part of the extended family. And yes, they can sometimes be prevailed upon to take care of members of the extended family (hey! there's that 'f' word again!) as opposed to random strangers off the street.
Your view seems to be that blood relation doesn't matter a damn, but only who YOU personally consider "family" is family.
Looking at the course of human history, where many people have died protecting their own family members, and sacrified a lot for their benefit, it would seem to be a very natural, primal instinct. We do privilege "ours" over "others". This is so obvious that human law has evolved to give it social primacy and protect its intactness, to use this instinct for the betterment of society.
So let's get back to the other thing you took umbrage at, i.e. that Family = father + mother + child.
But my point was that father + mother = child.
How can you have a child, biologically speaking, without a father and a mother? And a child, knowing that he exists, must know that he has a father and a mother. It's very natural to want to seek them out. How else do you explain the hundreds and thousands of adopted/surrogate children searching for their birth parents now that they have grown up? It's scaring the hell out of the sperm donors who never thought (in the 1970s) that trading a few squirts of semen for $25 beer money would come back to haunt them.... Hence the new debate over "right to privacy (for the donor)" vs. "right to know (for the child)".
Also...looking at 20th-century first world human society, it's pretty obvious that non-intact nuclear family (for whatever reason) leads to a higher rate of screwed-up kids. Just read the New Paper...
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"Father" and "Mother" are social roles, and those roles may theoretically be played out by anyone (the grandparents, the spinster aunts, the surrogate family, the single parent).
Yes, non-intact families lead to more screwed up kids. But I'm looking at substance over form here. If a kid had heterosexual parents who were (i) absent all the time, (ii) fought all the time; and/or (iii) paid him no mind, would he really be better off than a kid with less conventional parents who were around, didn't fight (as much) and/or paid attention?
As for the strength of blood ties, it's true, there's that old cliche about being thicker than water, but there's also the undeniable fact that many people find CNY a right pain in the ****.
I agree that it's natural that an adopted child, or a testtube child, would want to meet his biological "parents". But people do have more than one set of "parents" - divorced parents who both remarry, for instance.
I think the fundamental tangle lies in the equation of parent with DNA donor. It isn't the same thing.
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Eggs and sperm don't just come from nowhere.
Merriam-Webster defines "parent" as:
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin parent-, parens; akin to Latin "parere", "to give birth to"
Date: 15th century
a: one that begets or brings forth offspring b: a person who brings up and cares for another
You are quite right in that I conflate (a) and (b), while you think the two are separable.
I would say that many of the modern social problems we have arise, quite simply, from the fact that we have separated the two. It occasionally happens, for reasons beyond the parents' control, that they are unable to raise their child together. However, to deliberately frustrate this social structure is to invite confusion into the natural order -- and that has consequences beyond the individual.
Thank you for this interesting discussion so far. G'night!
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