I know, I know: ID fiasco, Darling’s lies to the House about who’s to blame, broken military covenant, part-time defence secretaries, more foot-and-mouth (government sponsored!), Lord West publicly recanting his thoughtcrime (he loves the Big Clunking Fist, for ever), Charlie Whelan’s sad delusions printed in the Telegraph and 24 billion of our Earth Pounds being pumped into Northern Wreck (so presumably there’ll be no more rubbish about Tory “black holes”?). It’s almost Wagnerian in its horror, innit? Let’s close our eyes and pretend this government never happened. It is Sunday, after all. That’s better. And breathe out.
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The government has said that IVF should be available to single women and lesbian couples who want to have a child “of their own”, without involving anything as retro as a man. I nearly didn’t write about this, because I feel so strongly about it (which makes me suspicious of my motives); also I noticed what might look like an internal inconsistency in my reasoning, and, maybe, because I feared you would think “what’s it got to do with him?”, given that the closest I’ll ever come to child-rearing is the odd occasion we drag Keith’s nieces and nephews around London (“Can we go to Macdonald’s?” “No.” “I hate you. You’re a man and you’re married to my uncle. Ha ha ha ha ha … ” “Chicken-bits-burger or cow-bits-burger?”). Then a friend pointed me to this article on the BBC website, and I read, with a sense of outrage, this piece of anti-male orthodoxy from Carol Sarler in the Times and I thought, this is getting ridiculous.
Deliberately creating babies in the absence of a father is a terrible proposal and no matter how often I deleted my scribbled thoughts about it this week, I kept coming back to it. I can think of statistical, evolutionary and cultural reasons to reject the proposal.
The potential inconsistency in my reasoning is that I am a supporter of the legislation which requires adoption agencies to consider gay couples as adoptive families for the children in their (the agencies’) care. Yet I find the concept of gay couples or single women engineering the creation of a child through IVF – if I’m honest – repulsive. After careful thought, and some statistical reasoning, I don’t find this an inconsistency. The difference is between what statisticians call marginal and conditional inference, about the outcomes for the child. Children who need families exist, now, and it seems to me to be impossible to say, with complete certainty, “none of those children could ever be raised well by a gay couple”. We have to condition on the existence of the child, and consider the options available to him or her: there is at least a finite probability that the child would be better off in a gay family than would be the case were he or she left in institutional care (and we know that no child would be so placed unless he or she would benefit). This is the conditional inference – a posteriori – conditional on the existence of the child. However, before a child is born – a priori – we cannot make specific inference about his or her outcomes (because he or she doesn’t exist): we can only make marginal inference, averaged over the population – an estimate of the outcomes for an as yet theoretical, but definitely fatherless, child. And we’ve got enough evidence now, haven’t we, that the average outcomes for fatherless children are bad enough for us not to seek to increase the number of children in the fatherless pool? Haven’t we?
I have sympathy, I am human, of course I have sympathy, for women who are driven by an intense biological longing to be a mother. That need, however strong it may be, does not overwhelm my distaste at willingly creating a child whose likely life outcome is profoundly at a disadvantage vis-à-vis those for a child born to a mother and father. To do a quick Richard Dawkins impersonation, there must be an evolutionary requirement for some people to be childless (it’s my favourite theory for homosexuality too), because such people (infertile heterosexuals, gay people) exist, generation after generation. My theory is that we require surplus (childless) adults, in order to enable the tribe as a whole to continue to thrive, because there’s not much more physically demanding than raising children. It requires on average slightly more than two people, in fact. That’s also why I find it ridiculous to read those articles by lazy journalists, bemoaning the fact that people with children sometimes get a bit of slack cut them at work, slack which, of course, the childless tend to pick up, as though those of us without children don’t benefit in any way at all from the raising of a generation of well-rounded children. What’s the alternative, anyway? That we encourage people to stop having children, so they can put in longer hours in the office? And that would lead to what, precisely, for a culture? Exactly. It leads to where we are now.
It is this cultural impact of fatherlessness which troubles me the most. Accepted, I have no paternal longings of my own; but like all of you, I had a father, and, like many of you, I can compare existence when he was alive with existence, now, without him. I think of him every time I cross London Fields to go to the Lido and see men kicking leaves for their children; I think of him every time I’m sat upstairs on the no.26, listening with half an ear to the tipsy, happy men phoning home to explain their lateness; I wonder if he would like Belle and Sebastian; I wonder what he would advise me to do about work (not that I’d listen, not at first, anyway); I think of him when Keith and I are falling about with laughter and then I wish, I wish every day, that he could meet Keith. I dream he’s alive quite often, and I suppose, in the sense that I am alive, and am a product of his love, that he is, metaphorically at least, still here. I told you before: most that is good in me, comes from my father. So. I’m unusual? I don’t think so. How can it be contemplated to willingly produce children – particularly boys – who will never have the love of a father?
I’ve written on a similar theme before, so apologies for the thematic repetition, but the educational and societal outcomes of the marginalisation of the male from families is all around us: and the government’s “solution” is to offer more of it? Society needs more children without fathers? Boys need less paternal input to their upbringing? Time for more deep breathing.
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