Consider a case now before the Kansas Supreme Court. An unmarried woman decided that she wanted a child and asked a friend to be a sperm donor. He agreed, and the woman gave birth to twins. The mother says that she always intended to raise the kids alone and never wanted the friend involved in their lives. The donor says that he planned to be the twins' father in name and practice. There is no written contract. What does the contemporary Solomon do?
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You'd think that we have enough problems keeping fathers around in this country, what with out-of-wedlock births and divorce. But these days, American fatherhood has yet another hostile force to contend with: artificial insemination, or AI.
While the number of kids born as a result of the procedure (about 1 million so far in the United States) is still quite small, AI is having a disproportionate cultural and legal effect and is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family.
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But with a growing number of AI cases involving single women and lesbian couples, the pretense of the donor's nonexistence is no longer tenable because there is no "other father." The issues then grow vastly more complicated: When is a sperm donor a father? Can his mother be the child's grandmother? Can a child have two mothers and no father?
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But it hasn't proved obvious to most legal experts, who continue to be guided by the old formula: As long as a doctor performs the insemination or a sperm bank sells the sperm, the donor is not a father. This doesn't simply mean that the child is fatherless in the way that, say, an orphan is fatherless. Rather, the child is born into an entirely new human circumstance. For, according to the law, the child never had a father at all. The man who fathered him is not in fact his father; instead, he's the originating site of organic material that was for sale, like a sulfur mine or a fish farm.
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Say a man has a drunken one-night stand. If the woman gets pregnant, the law sees him as a father, and he must pay child support for the next 18 years. But if a college student visits the local sperm bank twice a week for a year, produces a dozen children anonymously and pockets thousands of dollars, he can whistle his way back to econ class, no worries. Intentionality can't explain that legal disconnect.
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A family court in Burlington County, N.J., recently put two women on a state birth certificate. Some legal scholars are proposing that courts move beyond the "heterosexist model" entirely. Why not put three parents—or four, for that matter—on the birth certificate?
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Intentionality, it seems, can accomplish almost anything. And AI's potential has not been lost on radical feminists and postmodern anthropologists, who see the possibilities for deconstructing the traditional family—as indicated by book titles such as Conceiving the New World Order and Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination Is Changing the World.
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Yet even if the numbers of those suffering from father hunger are relatively small, their plight is consistent with a powerful human theme explored by storytellers from Homer to George Lucas: the child's longing to know his father. Marquardt describes AI and other reproductive technologies as presenting us with a competition between the rights of adults and the needs of children. Is there any question which is winning?
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There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men reinforces the worst that women fear in men.
Think of all the complaints you hear: Men can't commit, they're irresponsible, they don't take care of the kids. By going to a sperm bank, women are unwittingly paying men to be exactly what they object to. But why expect anything different? The very premise of AI is that, apart from their liquid DNA, we can will men out of children's lives. (more)
