It is Father’s Day. For me, this is a day to be grateful for my father, for all he did for me, my mother and my brothers and sisters. I am grateful for how he went to work every day, came home every night, and stayed married to my mother for a lifetime.
Most of all, I am grateful to him for my faith. It was his simple yet profound faith that gave me a Catholic girlhood, which is the foundation of
who I am today. I cannot hear the hymn “Faith of Our Fathers,” (often played at our parish on Father’s Day) without tearing up.
At the same time, I think of my young friends who have no relationships with their fathers, such as my young friend Alana. She is the Foundress of the Anonymous Us Project. Alana was donor conceived. She never knew her biological father. There were men who might have played that role in her life, because they occupied the husband-role in her mother’s life. But those men were not available to her the way my father was there for me. When Alana was old enough, she searched for her biological father. By the time she discovered his identity, he had died.
It is an understatement to say that the Modern Mind does not really understand the family. We don’t really understand what holds the family together, or what motivates people to form families in the first place.
We sometimes use an economic template for understanding why parents want children. The late Nobel Laureate, Gary Becker taught us to think of children delivering a stream of “child services” to the parents over a long period of time. Therefore, he argued that we can think of the child as a consumer durable, like a car or a refrigerator.
I have noticed that whenever I relate this idea, people either laugh or recoil. The “child as consumer durable” model is a thin shadow, a distortion of reality, and people know it.
But, hey, at least we have some template for the concept that an adult might want to have a child, however inadequate that template might be.
On the other hand, we have no template at all of why the child might want their own parent. We have the idea that the child’s needs can be met by any pair of hands who happen to be available and reasonably competent. A mom and a day, two moms, two dads, a skilled daycare worker: who cares? In our more lucid moments, we may observe and admit that children have preferences for their own parents. But we seem to have no idea why. We treat this preference as some kind of irrational, pre-modern superstition that a child really ought to get over.
If you don’t believe me, tune in to the comments boxes on articles dealing with donor conception. Donor Conceived People try to explain the problems they have had, stemming from the way they were conceived. I am always shocked by the callous and cavalier attitude people take toward them.
Our society is sleepwalking toward the idea that all adults are entitled to have children. The business of the state is to give adults what they want at the least cost to the adults. An unborn child has no rights that any born person is bound to respect. Infertile heterosexual couples got this ball in motion. The Gay Legal Establishment is moving the ball down the field. And the Infertility Industry has been coaxing the whole process along, in the interest of their fabulous profits.
And so it is, that we are about to write out of the law, the child’s right to know their fathers and mothers. The adult’s right to have a child biologically related to them, on the terms they find congenial, trumps the child’s right to know both of their parents and their full cultural, social and historical identity.
The State is increasingly taking sides with the adults, against the rights of the child. This is the price we are paying for our superficial understanding of the family.
I can only imagine that Father’s Day must be a tough day for some of the Donor Conceived Persons.
So, let me say to my Donor Conceived friends: Please forgive us for not paying attention to you as we should. Do not abandon the effort to make yourselves heard. We need your voices.
God loves you. I love you. We’re listening. Together we can coax other people to listen.
The Ruth Institute inspires the Survivors of the Sexual Revolution, including Donor Conceived Persons. Follow us on Facebook.