Marriage Articles
How Redefining Marriage Redefines Parenthood
By Elizabeth Marquardt
Talk given at The Iona Institute, Dublin
January 30, 2008
Do fathers matter? Do mothers matter?
Worldwide trends in law and reproductive technologies are
redefining parenthood in ways that increasingly put the
interests of adults before the needs of children.
Around the world, the two-person, mother-father model of
marriage and parenthood is being challenged. The growing
emphasis is on meeting adults' rights to children rather than
children's needs to know and be raised, whenever possible, by
their mother and father.
Trends driving this revolution in parenthood include high rates
of divorce and single-parent childbearing, the growing use of
egg and sperm donors, support for same-sex marriage, and
increasing interest in group marriage arrangements. These
changes are proceeding at breakneck speed as reproductive
technologies advance, as science continues pushing the
boundaries on baby-making, and as new constituencies are more
openly raising children and advocating for legal and public
recognition. Quite often the state is actively supporting and at
times leading the way in the revolution in parenthood.
In law and culture, the new idea is that children are fine with
any one or more adults being called their parents so long as the
appointed parents are nice people. But how do children feel
about the brave new world of parenthood? Do fathers and mothers
matter to children? Does how they feel matter?
Among the changes that are redefining the two-parent,
mother-father model of parenthood are:
In Canada, the law that recently legalized same-sex marriage
nationally also quietly erased the term "natural parent" across
the board in federal law, replacing it with the term "legal
parent." With that little-noticed change the focus of the law
dramatically shifted from the mother and father who make the
baby to the adults the state decides are a child's appropriate
parents.
In Spain, after the recent legalization of same-sex marriage the
National Civil Registry struck the words "mother" and "father"
from the first document issued to every newborn by the state.
Instead, all birth certificates will now read "Progenitor A" and
"Progenitor B."
A similar proposal was made in Massachusetts after the
legalization of same-sex marriage. The public health department
there proposed amending birth certificates for all children in
the state to read "parent A" and "parent B" rather than "mother"
and "father."
In New Zealand and Australia, influential law commissions have
proposed allowing children conceived with use of sperm or egg
donors to have three legal parents. Yet neither group addresses
the real possibility that a child's three legal parents could
break up and feud over the child's best interests.
Other steps governments are taking signal a greatly heightened
level of state intervention and increasing control over
reproduction and family life.
In Britain, a recent law banning donor anonymity caused a
purported drop in the number of persons willing to donate sperm
or eggs. Soon thereafter the government health service began an
active campaign to recruit sperm and egg donors, no longer just
allowing the planned conception of children separated from one
or both biological parents, but now very intentionally promoting
it.
In another example of active state support, in high-tax Denmark
the state subsidizes the practice of sperm donation by allowing
the income earned by sperm donors to be tax-exempt. The Danish
company Cryos, one of the world's largest sperm banks, ships
almost three-quarters of its sperm to individuals and couples
overseas - all with the implicit support of the Danish taxpayer.
And in a recent, dramatic step, the Danish parliament narrowly
passed a law that gives lesbian couples and single women the
right to obtain free artificial insemination at publicly-funded
hospitals.
In Vietnam, the state run hospital is running short of voluntary
sperm donors. It is now considering setting up a community sperm
bank in which those who request donor sperm must supply a family
member or friend who will donate sperm to the bank for use by
another couple. The increasing demand for sperm comes from
"families where husband and wife are white collar workers, and
single women who want a baby but wish to remain unmarried."
In Australia, a law passed in 1984 that allows sperm donors to
contact their over-18 offspring has now raised the prospect
that, starting this year, young adults who were conceived using
donor sperm might receive a letter from the state alerting them
to the sperm donor's wish to contact them. In Australia, as
elsewhere, most young people who were conceived with donor sperm
were never told the truth by their parents. To help offset the
potential shock, the state government in Victoria has proposed a
public advertising campaign warning all young adults that they
could be contacted by a sperm donor father they never knew
about.
Meanwhile, in the United States the field of reproductive
technology continues in an almost entirely unregulated
environment. Courts all too frequently must decide who a child's
parents are, picking and choosing among the many adults who
might be involved in planning, conceiving, birthing, and raising
a child.
In Pennsylvania, a judge recently had to decide parentage in a
case in which a surrogate mother carried triplets for a
62-year-old man and his 60-year-old girlfriend. When the couple
failed to pick up the infants, the hospital initiated steps to
put them in foster care. In response, and eventually with the
judge's approval, the surrogate mother took the children home
and began raising them as her own. But the commissioning couple
continues to fight for access to the children (and the
62-year-old man has been ordered to pay child support), while
the college student who contributed her eggs for their
conception asserted her parental rights as well.
Recently the California State Supreme Court heard three cases
from lesbian couples who used sperm donors to have children and
then split up. In these cases the non-biological mother figure
(none of whom had adopted the child) was either denied access to
the child or wished to have no further financial obligations to
the child. The courts ruled in all three cases that the
non-biological mother figure is like a child's father and should
be granted full parental status and held to the same standard of
rights and responsibilities. The outcome has potentially
far-reaching implications not just for same-sex couples but for
the many heterosexual couples in stepfamilies, as well as those
who might use reproductive technologies or temporarily raise
children together without marriage, adoption, or other legal
arrangements.
In fact, today same-sex couples, adoptive parents, and singles
and infertile couples using donors now routinely petition to
have one or both biological parents left off the birth
certificate -- and even to have non-biological parent figures
included without going through the process of adoption. In
Quebec, when a woman in a same-sex civil union gives birth, her
female partner is presumed to be the father and can be
registered as the father on the child's birth certificate. A
similar ruling was recently made in Ontario. Last year, a New
Jersey judge ruled for the first time in that state that the
same-sex partner of a woman who conceives with donor sperm has
an automatic right to be listed as a birth parent on the child's
birth certificate without having formally to adopt the child.
The state of California allows a "second mother" to be entered
on the birth certificate as the child's father. Earlier this
year, Virginia issued a birth certificate to a lesbian adoptive
couple that reads "Parent 1" and "Parent 2" after the couple
rejected having one of their names put in the blank for
"father." A similar suit was just filed in Oregon. More are
likely.
How the Global Redefinition of Parenthood Threatens
Children's Identity
Why should we be concerned about the many rulings, laws, and
proposals around the world that are aimed at redefining
parenthood?
A good society protects the interests of its most vulnerable
citizens, especially children. Right now, the institution that
is most core to children's very survival - that of parenthood -
is being fundamentally redefined with the state giving its
implicit support and at times leading the way.
The common thread running through many of these decisions is the
adult right to a child. These claims are important. The desire
for a child is a powerful force felt deep in the soul. This
desire must be responded to with respect and compassion. The
claim that medicine and society should help those who cannot
bear children is a legitimate one.
But the rights and needs of adults who wish to bear children are
not the only part of the story.
Children, too, have rights and needs. For example, the United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified in 1989,
states that "the child shall ... have the right from birth to a
name, the right to acquire a nationality and, as far as
possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her
parents." The authors of the convention understood several key
features necessary to human identity, security, and flourishing
- having a name, being a citizen of a nation whose laws protect
you, and, whenever possible, being raised by the two people
whose physical union made you.
Adults who support the use of new technologies to bear children
sometimes say that biology does not matter to children, that all
children need is a loving family. Yet biology clearly matters to
the adults who sometimes go to extreme lengths - undergoing
high-risk medical procedures; procuring eggs, sperm, or wombs
from strangers; and paying quite a lot of money - to create a
child genetically related to at least one of them. In a striking
contradiction, these same people will often insist that the
child's biological relationship to an absent donor father or
mother should not really matter to the child.
Of course, there is a very real and urgent role for the state to
play in defining parenthood. Some biological parents present a
danger to their children. Adoption is a pro-child social
institution that finds parents for children who desperately need
them. It is a highly admirable expression of altruistic love, a
kind of love that transcends our hard-wired tendencies to
protect our blood relations above all others. But the existence
of legal adoption was never intended to support the argument
that children don't care who their fathers and mothers are, or
to justify the planned separation of children from biological
mothers and fathers before the children are even conceived.
Certainly, biology is not everything. It does not and should not
determine the full extent or depth of human relationships.
Biological parents are tragically capable of harming their
children, and some children are better off removed from these
parents. But the actions and testimony of children and adults,
as well as a great deal of social science evidence, powerfully
suggest that biology does matter.
The Child's Point of View
To be perfectly clear, the question is not whether children love
the parents who raise them. Children almost universally and
unquestioningly love their parents, whether their parents are
married, divorced, single, gay or straight. Rather, the question
is how children feel and how they make sense of their identities
when their mother or father (or both) is absent from their daily
lives.
The first generation of donor conceived children who are now
coming of age form a remarkable case study to explore this
question. Most in this first generation were conceived by
married heterosexual couples using donor sperm. Anecdotally,
many are now speaking out about the powerful impact on
children's identity when adults purposefully conceive a child
with the clear intention of separating that child from a
biological parent. These young people often say they were denied
the birthright of being raised by or at least knowing about
their biological fathers. They say that this intentional denial
profoundly shapes their quest to understand who they are.
Donor conceived teenagers and adults are forming organizations,
being quoted in news articles, and using the Internet to try to
contact their sperm donors and find half-siblings conceived with
the same sperm. They hail from the United States, Canada,
Australia, Britain, Japan, and elsewhere. Numbers are hard to
come by, but estimates are that the number of children now born
in the U.S. each year through artificial insemination range from
30,000 to 75,000 and that about 3,000 each year are conceived
using donor eggs. While the numbers arguably are small, they are
growing, and the stories these young people tell raise questions
not only about their own experience but about the prospects for
the next generation of children.
Donor conceived young people point out that the informed consent
of the most vulnerable party - the child - is not obtained in
reproductive technology procedures that intentionally separate
children from one or both of their biological parents. They ask
how the state can aid and defend a practice that denies them
their birthright to know and be raised by their own parents and
that forcibly conceals half of their genetic heritage. Some call
themselves "lopsided" or "half adopted." At least one uses the
term "kinship slave." Some born of lesbian or gay parents call
themselves "queer spawn," although others in the same situation
find the term offensive. No studies have been done on these
young people's long-term emotional experience. Clearly, rigorous
long-term studies need to be done. For now, we should listen to
their compelling voices.
In interviews, donor conceived young adults often say something
like this: My sperm donor is "half of who I am." One young woman
says she wants to meet her donor because she wants to know "what
half of me is, what half of me comes from." Another says, "I
want to meet the donor because I want to know the other half of
where I'm from." Another is seeking information because, she
says, "I feel my right to know who I am and where I come from
has been taken away from me."
A 17 year old in Texas plans to ask the California sperm bank
that aided in her conception to forward a letter to her donor
when she turns 18. "There's a lot of unanswered questions in my
life and I guess I want the answers," she explained. By
contrast, her mother, interviewed for the same story, observed,
"As a woman dealing with the prospect of infertility, all you
want is that baby...It never even occurred to me this child
might want to find her biological father someday."
Just recently a 14 year old girl in Pennsylvania wrote to Dear
Abby after finding out she was conceived with donor sperm. In
just a few sentences she identified some of the enormous
identity issues that confront donor conceived young people and
that are now a challenge to our society. She wrote: "It scares
me to think I may have brothers or sisters out there, and that
he may not care that I exist." This young teenager, struggling
alone with feelings of abandonment, grief, and confusion,
poignantly challenged the current legal and social position on
this issue: "I don't understand why it's legal to just donate
when a child may be born."
The Social Science Evidence Suggesting the Importance of
Biological Parents
From a social scientific point of view, what do we know about
children's experiences when they do not grow up with their own
mother and father? In many areas we know a great deal. In some,
we need to learn more.
Increasing numbers of people are realizing that marriage has
important benefits for children. What many do not know is that
there is something about the marriage of a child's own mother
and father (as opposed to a remarriage) that on average brings
these benefits. On many important indicators of child
well-being, such as teen pregnancy, educational failure,
delinquency, and child abuse, children raised in stepfamilies
look more like children of single parents than children raised
by their own, married mother and father.
Some who advocate for legalized same-sex marriage say that it
will be good for children because the children will now have two
parents. But the stepfamily data suggest it may not be that
simple. We don't know how much the poorer outcomes in
stepfamilies are due to the history of dissolution and other
unique problems facing stepfamilies, and how much is due to the
child being raised in a home with a non-biologically related
stepparent.
Moreover, the existing research on same-sex parenting is small
and limited because same-sex couples raising children comprise a
very small part of the overall population and are only recently
becoming more visible. And a big problem with the current
literature is that most of it compares single lesbian mothers to
single heterosexual mothers - in other words, children in one
kind of fatherless family with children in another kind of
fatherless family.
We have far more to learn. But evidence and sensitive
observations of children's lives strongly suggest the importance
to children of recognizing their need to be raised, whenever
possible, by their own mother and father (with adoption as a
critical, pro-child back up plan) and the importance of
recognizing the absence of their mother or father as a serious
loss for a child.
The Revolution in Parenthood - What's Next?
Increasing Slippage in Meaning of Fatherhood and
Motherhood/psychological parenthood
The revolution of parenthood is contributing to further deep
uncertainties in the meanings of fatherhood and motherhood.
By far the most striking and potentially far-reaching
development - one already being witnessed in numerous courts -
is the increasing recognition of "psychological" parenthood or
"de facto" parental status. In the United States at least ten
states, including Washington, California, Maine, Massachusetts,
New Jersey, and Wisconsin, now allow someone with no biological
or adoptive relationship to a child (and no marital relationship
to a child's parent) to be assigned parental rights and
responsibilities as a psychological or de facto parent. To
determine retrospectively whether an adult was a "parent" in a
child's life the courts examine indications such as whether the
adult lived in the same household as the child, was encouraged
to act as a parent by the child's existing parent, had acted
like a parent without expecting financial compensation, and had
spent enough time with the child to have bonded with him or her.
In many of these cases the petitions are brought by ex-partners
who charge that the child's existing parent is denying their
rights to the child. In other cases the child's existing parent
charges that the expartner is now shirking parental
responsibilities. These cases typically concern same sex
partners, but they also have serious, as yet unknown
implications for the many heterosexuals who are or have been a
child's stepparent or a parent's live-in partner.
Hard sciences:
The meaning of motherhood and fatherhood is encountering further
challenges in the hard sciences. Right now, scientific research
around the world with the DNA in eggs and sperm that is raising
the possibility that children could be born from one genetic
parent, two same-sex parents, or three parents. Headlines
recently announced research at leading universities in Britain
and New Zealand that could enable same-sex couples or single
people to procreate. British scientists have been granted
permission to create a human embryo with three genetic parents,
and last year, a team in Scotland tricked an egg into dividing
and created a embryo without a genetic father. Japanese
scientists have already created a mouse with two genetic mothers
and no father.
Meanwhile, the stem cell research field is growing ever closer
to the fertility industry, as scientists strike bargains with
doctors to secure eggs needed for therapeutic cloning from women
undergoing fertility treatments, and as cloning techniques are
perfected with the likelihood that they will one day, sooner or
later, be used to produce babies. James Watson, of Watson and
Crick fame, and Robert Edwards, the father of IVF treatment,
last year both called at a public conference for reproductive
cloning to be made available to couples who have exhausted all
other options. In the hard sciences too, the two-person,
mother-father model of parenthood is facing serious challenges.
New developments in the marriage debate are also posing new
challenges:
Whatever one's feeling about the legalization of same-sex
marriage, and however emphatically most advocates of same-sex
marriage say they do not support group marriage, recent events
make clear that successes in the same-sex marriage movement have
emboldened others who wish to borrow the language of civil
rights to break open the two-person understanding of marriage
and, with it, parenthood. These efforts are emerging from at
least two surprising directions.
Polyamory - Polyamorists are perhaps the newest, most unfamiliar
players on the scene. Polyamory (meaning "many loves") is
different from polygamy (meaning "many marriages"). Polyamory
involves relationships of three or more people, any two of whom
might or might not be married to one another.
Advocates for polyamory often explicitly mimic the language used
by supporters of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. They say
they must keep their many loves "in the closet." That they
cannot risk revealing their personal lives for fear of losing
their jobs or custody of their children. That to reveal their
inner "poly" nature is "coming out of the closet." That being
poly is just who they are. For these folks, if two parents are
good for children, then three or more "parents," spread among
one or more households and sharing a sexual relationship with
one another, is even better.
The topic of polyamory is emerging at the cutting edge of family
law and advocacy, and among religious organizations the
Unitarian Universalists for Polyamorous Awareness hope to make
theirs the first to recognize and bless polyamorous
relationships.
Polygamy - Polygamy, of course, is much better known and is
currently criminalized in the United States and much of the
west. This might change. The new polygamy series on HBO, "Big
Love," spawned surprisingly positive coverage of polygamy this
spring, including sympathetic television interviews with
polygamous families, a spate of news stories, including the
opinion of polygamy activists that theirs is the next civil
rights battle, and even a New York Times columnist who argued,
"If polygamy is the strongest argument against same-sex
marriage, then let the wedding bells ring." And in a development
that shocked many Canadians, two government studies released
last winter by their Justice Department recommended the
decriminalization of polygamy. In the US and Canada a number of
legal scholars are arguing, as one columnist summarized, that
"the abuses of polygamy flourish amidst the isolation, stigma,
and secrecy spawned by criminalization." Polygamy per se is not
a problem, only "bad" polygamy.
Conclusion
So, what do we do now?
Given that in some ways the genie is already out of the bottle,
it is not entirely clear what actions the state and social
leaders should take in the near future. For instance, with
regard to reproductive technology, some nations have moved to
ban the practice of anonymous donation of sperm and eggs. This
would seem to be a positive development for children - after
all, there is a strong argument to be made that children have a
right and need to know their origins. Yet greater acceptance of
the idea that donor conceived children have a right to know
their origins is also leading to the idea that these children
should have the possibility of some kind of relationship with
their sperm or egg donor (and not just a file of information),
or even that the donor should have some kind of legal parental
status in the child's life, such as in New Zealand and Australia
where commissions have proposed allowing donors to "opt in" as
children's third legal parents.
What might the future hold for children with three or more legal
parents? We have no idea.
Or, in another example, after Britain passed a law banning donor
anonymity there was a purported drastic drop in the number of
men willing to donate sperm. Couples in that nation who wish to
conceive now have even greater incentive to go abroad to nations
or regions that have less regulation - such as Spain, India,
Eastern Europe, or elsewhere - to procure sperm or eggs or
surrogate wombs, making it even less likely that their child
will ever be able to trace their origins or form a relationship
with a distant (and sometimes impoverished) donor abroad.
Again, how will these developments affect children? At the
moment we have no real idea. But we certainly do have serious
and immediate cause for concern.
For reasons like these, this report does not conclude with the
usual list of specific policy recommendations. Rather, this
report issues a call to fellow citizens in the United States and
Canada and around the world. The call is for all of us to
participate in urgently needed conversation and research about
the revolution in parenthood and the needs of children.
To provide time and space for this conversation and for more
research, this report also calls for a moratorium or a "time
out" lasting five years. Until we better understand and
prioritize the needs of children, no legislatures, courts, or
commissions should press forward with recommendations or changes
that broadly undermine the normative importance of mothers and
fathers in the lives of children, nor should they support
intentionally denying unborn children knowledge of and a
relationship with their own mother and father. Rather, they
should concentrate their energies on rigorous inquiry and active
debate about the needs of children and the role of mothers and
fathers in their lives.
The facts are this: Unless and until same-sex procreation or
three-person reproduction becomes a reality, children will
always arise from the union of one man and one woman. All
children have, as the French feminist philosopher Sylviane
Agacinski calls it, a "double origin," that of a mother and a
father, an origin we cannot deny and that the children certainly
cannot ignore, for they see it every time they look in the
mirror. When we change the mother-father dimension of marriage
or the two-person understanding of marriage, we also change
understandings of parenthood in ways that dramatically impact
the future for children.
Do mothers and fathers matter to children? Is there anything
special - anything worth supporting - about the two-person,
mother-father model? These are the questions on the table. Let's
not experiment on a new generation of children and wait for the
results to come in twenty years down the road. The time to take
on these questions is now. |
