...On first thought, Americans seem really keen on fathers. We fret about the emotional impact of father absence and insist "that responsibility does not end at conception," as then-candidate Barack Obama put it in a memorable speech last Father's Day. We excoriate "deadbeat dads" who fail to pay their share of their children's upbringing; in fact, the stimulus bill adds $1 billion to child-support enforcement. Married fathers who don't step up and share the burdens of diapers and pediatrician appointments are condemned, in the words of one much-discussed book of essays, as "bastards on the couch." After all, the argument goes, a father is just as much a parent as a mother.

Except when we decide he's not, as did Ms. Suleman and her medical enablers. According to media reports, the male friend who provided the sperm for all of Suleman's 14 children had begged her to stop after the first six -- to no avail. Having consented to the use of his sperm, he would have been expected to give up control over the future children created with them. More commonly, sperm banks offer young men who will remain anonymous $200 for a little R&R that they would happily engage in without remuneration; as the Fairfax Cryobank in Virginia has advertised: "Why not do it for money?" Donors -- or, more precisely, sellers -- sign contracts that assure them, contrary to Father's Day rhetoric, that responsibility really does end at conception.

Sperm banks and fertility doctors hardly bear sole responsibility for defining fathers down to chromosome factories. Clearly, donors themselves happily agree to their downgraded status. Their nonchalance is in line with the widespread assumption that we should expand the rubric of "a woman's right to choose" to include not just abortion -- where a woman's decision understandably carries more moral weight than a man's -- to the care of and responsibility for actual children, where it's not at all clear why that should be the case.

Labels: donor conception, Fathers

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:50 PM | link

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