Friday, May 23, 2008

Does a child need a father?

Single women and lesbian couples won landmark parental rights last night as MPs voted to remove the requirement that fertility clinics consider a child’s need for a father.

A fatherless child can apparently have a normal childhood if surrounded by the needed care. Currently there are cases of fatherless children because of the death of their fathers, divorce or the fathers simply have disappeared without leaving any trace.

What may matter for a child is to have a father-figure imbuing him with fatherly qualities. But for many, there is nothing like a real father, especially in societies where the mother and the father are the centre of the family. In many (Muslim) societies, it is an insult to describe someone as being illegitimate or the child of unknown father.

It seems only animals don’t need a father when born and they can altogether do without their mother when grownups. Needless to say, there are also types of birds as well as wolves that make everlasting couples, which jointly care for their offspring.

It remains to see if some people copulate without looking back at their actions or they take such action with responsibility as it can result in the birth of a human being entitled to have a family life.

Men who donate their sperms and women who donate their eggs must be crazy as they encourage lesbians and gays to act against prevailing social norms by having children that can know just one parent they’re from and without ever having the chance to know the other parent.

There are still people who are curious or proud of their family trees. With the new law, children can trace their families just from the side of their mothers.

But normally a child should know who his father is, at least later in life. When adults, these children are likely to feel something missing in their lives if they have never experienced fatherly attention.

Many adopted children feel they aren’t the natural children of adoptive parents. Relations can be good with them, but an essential part from which they were born is still missing.

Allowing mothers to have children, without necessarily revealing their fathers, is just a response to their egoistic desires to be mothers and have a family. But there is the denial of the right of the child to know his father, especially if that is possible.

As incest is still prohibited, it is likely that a daughter and her father can have sex or even get married without knowing the biological relationships between them.

Maybe UK society has gone a step much further. It is normal to have single mothers. There were 1.9 million single parents as of 2005, with 3.1 million children, 81% of single parents in the UK are mothers.

Now with the fact that fertility clinics no longer need to consider a child’s need for a father, it seems there will be a surge in the birth of children from gays and lesbians. It remains to see how these children can cope in society. Or will there be a community of gays and lesbians, transmitting these practices to their children? Contrary to straight people for whom it is a must the couple should be heterosexual, gays and lesbians may convince their children that the right way to live is to be homosexual.

There is also the position of the church. Will it baptise these children? Or in the end, will there be a church for this category of people?

3 comments:

Looney said...

This is a good topic. One thing we note in the US is that there is a violent inner city - sadly mostly populated by minorities - and more peaceful suburbs. A key factor in this is that most of the children in the inner cities are born to single mothers. The father figure for the young boys often becomes the local criminal gangs. The resulting culture of violence and family dysfunction repeats from generation to generation, while the government does nothing to discourage things and the Ph.d's insist that this is normal.

The MP's in England probably view this as an issue of religion and tradition vs. modern reality. I agree with you on this, but hope people will put it more strongly: If you use animals for role models in raising your children, then don't be surprised when they start behaving like ill-disciplined animals.

Abdelilah Boukili said...

Thanks Looney for the comment.
The bottom line is that it is unnatural to deprive children from their fathers. People by nature like to know their origins. A child who can never have the chance to know its father is likely to continue to live feeling something important missing.

Looney said...

Yes, it is true that it is unnatural. The problem is that Ph.d. intellectuals in sociology who study families will swear that there is no evidence of abnormalities with children who are raised without a father. That is why I usually like to emphasize the real world chaos that results.