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| The Widening Middle Eastern War | Watch Your Wallet Says Pete Du Pont |
by Christopher Chantrill
December 19, 2006 at 8:20 am
SUPPOSE YOU decided that you wanted a child and you got yourself inseminated by anonymous sperm donor from a sperm bank. You’d be exercising your reproductive choice, of course, as guaranteed by a penumbra of the constitution.
There’s just one thing, and it’s something that we adults tend to forget as we forge ahead on our “sexual choices.”
What does the kid, the issue from such a union, think about having an anonymous sperm donor as a father?
Not much, according to Katrina Clark, the grown child of a sperm donor.
When she was 32, my mother -- single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family -- allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child.
...
As long as [the] adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?
Well, not exactly. What about the kid in question?
Of course, she and her mother are proud liberals. Why wouldn’t they be, as a single-parent family? But there’s a question of rights.
I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.
So Katrina decided to try and find out who her sperm-donor father was, and quickly found out. Wonderful!
Only, of course, the sperm donor really didn’t want to be an actual “father.” After the excitement of discovering her father and sharing her feelings about being donor conceived,
I noticed that his enthusiasm for our developing relationship seemed to be waning. When I told him of my suspicion, he confirmed that he was tired of "this whole sperm-donor thing."
We humans wouldn’t be humans without our searing combination of ruthless selfishness and genuine caring. But wouldn’t a system of rational ethics have something to say about the ethics of having a child when one of the parents was just an anonymous cipher? Wouldn’t it at least recognize that every child wants a mother and a father: her mother and her father?
There’s one good thing. Katrina isn’t angry at her mother.
I've never been angry at my mother -- all my life she has been my hero, my everything.
Thank goodness for that.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Actually, I rather suspect she is, but like many caught up in situations like this, there is no one clear cut to blame, so she internalizes it. This is an unhappy situation to be sure, though I can think of worse ones. Recall the Spanish proverb: "God said take what you want, and pay for it." Of course, there is no way of talling beforehand how high the cost will be.
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is merely relative, is asking you not to believe him. So dont.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Paul Dirac: When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.
John Farrell, The Creation Myth
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, Letter to Lord Lytton
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill