I am going to try to do this a little neater...
Actually, children do need a father - even the sperm bank needs to get it's donations from someone with a penis. Have you not read the articles about the now grown sperm donor generation that is desperately searching for their fathers?? The lengths that they are going to find the person that ejaculated into a cup for $15 so that they could be brought into this world?
First of all, let's be realists and accept, flat out, that there's a distinction between fathering a child and being a father to a child. Any fifth-grader knows that. Sperm donors do not qualify, under law, as legal guardians or custodians of the children they father. They're a biological necessity for men - DUH. As for the children being produced, their search for their mothers' sperm donors is independent of their alleged need for a father. Seeking out one's "missing half" is an innate reaction that any child would feel, regardless of the circumstances under which they were born. Their need to fill in the blank does not translate into wanting, or even needing, another full-time parent because GUESS WHAT - they already have one.
Secondly, donors receive considerably more than $15 per shot. The donor evaluation process is actually quite extensive and rigorous and qualified donors are compensated very well.
It's interesting that you regard 2 parent families as being "traditionalist thinking". I guess you could call survival of the species "traditionalist thinking".
Our survival is only dependent on successfully procreating healthy babies and subsequently raising decent human beings. Where is it written that husband+wife is the only means by which to achieve this? Like most archaic traditions that we cling to with such desperation and sentimentality, which we evolve past eventually, social and technological equalizers will allow women to provide for their children as much, if not better, than a dysfunctional marriage would. Women today are given so many more options with regard to their status in the workforce and at home. I'm not saying that men are expendable, but I am saying that if they're not an option for you, then you shouldn't be punished for still wanting a child. At that point, it isn't about marriage anymore - it's about family, and there is more than one kind of family.
Granted, the nuclear family has been one of the many building blocks of our civilization, but it's not a constant throughout history and hasn't been for other civilizations. It was an equation we assumed would produce the best possible outcome for economic reasons: a helpless, dependent woman needed a man to support her and a man needed a woman to bear his children. That was the equation for most of history, but circumstances have changed a lot. Just because a person doesn't want to be married, which is an optional institution required to procreate, doesn't immediately disqualify someone from having a baby! People have to stop thinking of marriage as a prerequisite to having children, even if you think it's ideal. It's unfair and judgmental to compel people into lifestyles with which they are not comfortable. You are wagging your self-righteous finger at a woman who is happy, whose child is happy, and whose goals have been attained, from a glass house. People who criticize single mothers need to take a closer look at their own lives, their broken and dysfunctional marriages, their adherence to tradition for tradition's sake, and analyze who it's really benefitting. It's often people with seemingly squeaky clean lives who have the most problems, and yet they're the ones projecting their own failures and inadequacies onto people who just didn't follow the same path, as if it takes something away from their incalculable "sacrifices." I guess misery really does love company then. Just because you think a specific arrangement is better on an aggregate level, you have to allow for outliers. Cases like this are exemplary in this way. It demonstrates that we don't all have to do the same exact thing.
If we have all of these wonderfully empowered women taking charge
of their fertility and raising the next generation sans men, who is going to
teach all of our boys how to be fathers? How to be responsible for their
progeny?
Your arguments are sexist and they marginalize women. Only a man can teach a boy how to be a man? What happened to just raising good people? Women are more than capable of teaching their sons to be responsible, respectful, and successful. Your slight on women seems to argue that women alone are incapable of instilling values in their children, which is also quite insulting. Having strong male role models is one thing, but having any strong role model in general is better than having none at all. Try rephrasing your statement. It's important that we raise good people and, last time I checked, women were capable of doing so.
Single mothers confront daunting challenges everyday because they have to essentially be both mother and father; they have to wash and dry, they have to reward and punish, they have to comfort and teach, they have to pay attention 100% of the time, they have to forgive and forbid, they have to be sensitive and stoic, they have to embody the qualities that both parents would bring to the child. I think it's admirable when a single person, man or woman, can do all of this for their chid. Children are not solely influenced by their parents, either. Children can be surrounded by a network of friends and family that raise them. Happiness and well-being is not predicated upon a single standard, a standard that you are preaching as if it's the only solution to an epidemic of sorts. There's room in this world for all kinds of families, all with the same unassailable objective: raise a happy, healthy, well-adjusted person. Men and women, in the end, learn the same lessons about life. They don't have to be steered down neither a qualitatively female path, nor a qualitatively male path. Rather, what we should be focused on is raising our children well. How we do that is not your call to make.
To say that only a man can teach a boy how to be a man means that you believe that only a woman could teach a girl how to be a woman. So by your logic, daughters don't need fathers, and thus your argument falls apart. I get what you're trying to say, you're just saying it poorly. I agree with you that children need role models, but we ought not confine them to mother/father. Where is it written that a child only learns through the behavior of their parents and the structure of their family? If every child mimicked the behavior of their parents or replicated their parents' structure, we'd never change. Your arguments call into question the author's ability to provide her child with a good life because she has not given him a father, but it's not your place to cast aspersions on her attempts at being an excellent mother. I think that people who argue exactly what you are endorsing are socially negligent and dismissive. After reading all of these comments, it's clear to me that you've lost this argument and now you're holding on to your flimsy premise despite the fact that you've been bested. Your defensiveness is transparent, and your reactionary behavior has definitely provoked the contrarians, and once someone appears to take this issue to personally, to me, indicates that you lack the confidence in the validity of your own argument - and you should - because it's a broken one.
I think it's wonderful that your child has a father who stays in life, but at least give credit to people who fundamentally want the same thing as you - to raise a good person - but don't follow your rules. Again, it's just not your place to malign her for her means even though your ends are the same.
For what it's worth, I hope the author's irreducible and immeasurable love for her son can give her the confidence to raise him to have a deeply rooted sense of pride, respect, and admiration in his mother, which will be a foundation for him, with or without a father. Some children don't even get that.
To the men and the fathers: I applaud those of you who are involved in your children's lives. This goes for husbands and single fathers alike. It's no easier being a father than it is being a mother. That is not my argument, and I am not saying that you are irrelevant or expendable. You have just as much a right to love and nurture your children. The author does not deny the father access to his son. They came to a mutual agreement long before we even had this discussion, and their arrangement remains between them and their son. Her course of action is not militantly feminist at all. That just doesn't make sense. She could have just as easily conned some poor sap into impregnating her, and then taken him to the cleaners for child support, and denied him access to his son. She did not. Rather, she was honest with him, and they agreed with open eyes and clear heads how this child would be born and raised. So maybe they colored outside the lines a little in your opinion, but so what?! At least they did it in a way that based on honesty and a commitment to the same purpose. Making child-rearing so mechanistic by predetermining the structure of their family is extremely narrow-minded and self-righteous. For once, just try to imagine that someone can do it differently, if not better, than you, and stop fighting to fit people into these neat little categories and equations. There is no prescription or manual that instructs you on the singular way to start a family, and you cannot capitalize on your morality and sanctimony. You alone do not possess the answers about how we should all raise our children. Rather than just congratulate her and wish her and her son all the best, you chime in with your superiority and arrogance, as if it's somehow constructive. The problem with all of the holier-than-thou social commentators is that they claim to posses an infallible certitude in their personal choices with which everyone else should agree. If that's not arrogance then I don't know what is.
