January 31, 2008

Are fathers passé?

Perhaps that is not the real question. The real question, from the perspective of enlightened social engineering in the progressive UK, is "should" fathers be passé? To which question the unequivocal politically-correct answer du jour is certainly "of course!"

Now that lesbians and single women only need some sperm in order to have their very own babies, raised without a demanding and oppressive male biological father around, and social science research is supposedly starting to confirm the unlikely proposition that such children are not just AS well off but in fact even BETTER off in some ways than children whose biological father lives in the home (apparently because two lesbians are more caring and loving than a mom and dad), well then - what else are men, and what else should they be, but prospective sperm donors?

This is the real victory of feminism. Perhaps one day we will be able to clone sperm out of women's cells - a story like that appeared quite seriously in the media last year. If that happens then we won't need men at all in the end, and we could essentially breed them out of the human race and into extinction. Hurray for peace in the world!

The funny thing is that even as Britain struggles under the clamoring of the reproductive rights lobby to take away the legal recognition of the importance of fatherhood, in America the government is trying hard to do the opposite: to make deadbeat dads take some responsibility for their children, to stick around rather than abandon women to be single moms, to make an appearence in the lives of their children. But why should they? According to the UK's reproductive lobby, the fathers have done their job - they donated the sperm and created the baby. The woman chose to keep it rather than having an abortion. And social science says that fathers are not needed after all.

So maybe we should all act like a pack of wild animals once again, and have the fathers disappear after the copulation is done, for everyone's benefit. That is, unless the woman wants to keep one around, not for the child but for herself. The rumor has it that men are good at certain domestic chores and other heavier work...but certainly nothing that women couldn't do themselves and just as well, or even better.

January 30, 2008

"My babies are for sale"

According to this article in the Times online, Jill Hawkins is at it again, planning yet another "surrogate" pregnancy. Britain's most prolific child producer has already given (or rather, sold) 7 of her own children for about 12,000 UK pounds each. Now she is planning to get impregnated yet again, for another 12,000 pounds, as well as for a temporary feeling of being loved, valued and cared for (by the drooling parents-to-be) and another temporary "fix" of having meaning in life.

As a traditional surrogate, Jill is not impregnated with embryos created with the sperm and eggs of another couple. Rather, she receives the sperm of the man who is commissioning the child, and the sperm then fertilizes her own egg. The children she bears are truly and fully her own, and she is their biological mother.

But Jill claims, once again, not to have any attachment to the children that are her own. All she really craves is the pregnancy itself, she says.

Um, yeah. I guess that must be why she has attempted suicide in the past. I guess that's why she has, in the past, been diagnosed with heavy depression and why she is still dependent on antidepressants.

Among the comments to the article, Michael Moore of Slough, UK makes a very good point - it is obvious that Jill Hawkins is "actually using 'serial pregnancy' to overcome her own ongoing trauma."

Should this be legal? No way. I do feel bad for infertile couples, I really do - BUT their own pain, misery and desire for children does not give them the right to exploit people like Jill Hawkins, who are ready to sell their own babies for some love that they've never gotten in life (and for a nice lump sum of cash too, of course).

Once again I'd like to point out that we cannot count on self-regulation by women like Jill Hawkins, by the infertile couples or even by the fertility clinics, brokers and agents who spring up like mushrooms after rain in order to reap the middlemen bonuses. There is only one way to prevent these reproductive abuses that leave children as the greatest victims, and that is by government regulation and its enforcement.