May 30, 2007

Is the notion of fatherhood becoming obsolete? Researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Great Britain say they are on the verge of creating sperm cells from bone marrow. This would allow women to conceive children completely without men.

In essence, this technological development would render men obsolete and completely unnecessary in the process of breeding babies. This is the ultimate feminist and lesbian dream -- men completely out of the picture.

This technology may never actually emerge from the laboratory, though there is no real reason to believe that it is impossible. The British researchers are continuing their work and claim that the experiments are ethical "so long as it's safe."

Meanwhile, Kay S. Hymowitz argues that an existing technology, widely used in the United States, is already redefining the family -- artificial insemination (or "AI").

In "The Incredible Shrinking Father," published in the current issue of City Journal, Hymowitz explains that our culture is fast moving to recognize a class of persons who never existed before -- children without fathers. 

As she observes:

[A]ided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family. There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men promotes the very male carelessness that leads a lot of women to become single mothers in the first place. And fatherless families are a delicate proposition, as AI families are discovering, since all the scientists' technology and all the lawyerly contracts can't take human nature out of human reproduction.

The background to this development is very interesting.  Hymowitz is correct in arguing that early advocates of artificial insemination had no intention of redefining the family.  Their only interest was in allowing couples to have children.  But, as Hymowitz also observes, this approach was both short-lived and naive.  "From today's vantage point," she explains, "the approach seems typical of a time too enamored of family secrets and overly cowed by medical authority. Yet if the mid-century approach to artificial insemination was excessively protective of the feelings of infertile men and failed to grasp that family secrets have a way of unraveling rather messily, it also recognized, as did the culture at large, that a child needs both clarity and an intact home."

Since then, technological, moral, and social developments have transformed the picture.  Commercial sperm banks added a huge profit motive to the equation and market economics drove an expansion of available services.  On the moral front, the massive transformation of sexual ethics further decoupled reproduction from heterosexual marriage. Social and legal shifts also added momentum, leading to what Hymowitz calls "artificial insemination's almost entirely unregulated march into the mainstream of American life."