Families without Fathers

Over at the Wall Street Journal , Kay Hymowitz, sees the story of Nadya Suleman, aka Octomom , as another troubling sign that fathers are loosing their foothold in society:

But in all of this punditry one question goes missing: Where is Octodad? Surely Ms. Suleman’s babies have a father. Yet his role in the baby-palooza is barely mentioned. Not that this should surprise anyone. The reaction to Ms. Suleman and her brood typifies our cultural ambivalence about fathers, an ambivalence fed in no small measure by the fertility industry.

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 . . . .

But our equivocation about paternity is finally untenable. Out-of-wedlock birth rates in the U.S. are now 38%; among African-Americans the figure is 70%. Fathers of children living with single mothers are far less involved with their children than are married fathers; about a third of all children in single-mother families have not seen their father in the previous year. Yet decades of social science have made it clear: Children who grow up without their fathers experience more poverty, have more problems at school, more trouble with the law — and more single motherhood in the next generation.

Untenable, indeed.