Paul Weyrich
Thursday, May 10, 2007

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Although she lives 3,000 miles away in California, my cousin Kathy has once again inspired me to write.

She recently sent me a newspaper clipping entitled "The Daddy Dilemma," apparently part of a larger article published in several newspapers and on the Internet. The author is Kay S. Hymowitz.

I have no idea what her politics are, but she has written elsewhere about the American family and her work touches on many of the things wrong with our culture today. The specific article that Kathy sent me deals primarily with a topic most people don't think about very often — or want to think about — that has contributed to the fatherless society we see promulgated in the media and our daily lives.

That subject is artificial insemination.

In America we live in a world of too many choices. I recently wrote about cable television, which now offers over 150 channels in some cities. I have heard it said that when Europeans come to the United States they are often amazed at our grocery stores with their 20 brands of soap and 50 choices of breakfast cereals and the fact that every individual has a car. And then, of course, there are the more important choices in life than what to buy in the grocery store, such as whether to go to college or to marry or have a child.

Since Roe v. Wade, we know that whether or not to have a child is just another "lifestyle" choice.

Abortion makes it possible not to have a child at all. If a woman is underage, she would need her parents' permission to work past 10:00 p.m., but her parents do not need to know that she has had an abortion. If a woman is married, no one needs to inform the father of the child that she has aborted it. But our devotion to choice also goes the other way: What if you want to have a child but cannot?

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That's why over the same period of years when abortion has become commonplace, artificial insemination has flourished.

When marriage and children were inseparable, children were expected to have two parents. And unless a married couple chose not to have children or could not, for medical reasons, children were considered a gift of God and a gift to society itself.

What was a moral commitment to marry and start a family has been reduced merely to another consumer choice. Any single woman or a lesbian couple or two gay men with a surrogate, any and all of these combinations of people and several others can now become parents thanks to artificial insemination, a practice that was once routinely used only in cows.

Artificial insemination is actually a descendant of the theory of eugenics. It allows human beings to plan half the genetic material of a future child.

Obviously, what women look for are characteristics they prefer: the color of hair and IQ and personality traits that they desire. But who wants to be the one to eventually tell little Heather that her two mommies picked her daddy out of a catalogue?

Surprisingly, no one seems to have thought much about this when they decided so-called sperm banks would be treated in law and in society as a consumer business. But it turns out many of these children are curious. Some, according to author Kay Hymowitz, are angry.

In other words, nobody really thought of what would be best for the babies created for the adults served by this baby-making business.

Here we spend millions of tax dollars chasing down deadbeat dads who refuse to pay child support when other men get paid to make babies and walk away. (In many states these donor fathers are protected by law from ever having to acknowledge their identity.) And we have millions of fertility clinics to help women who cannot get pregnant while millions of other women abort healthy babies every year.

After all, a child can be a tasteful accessory in an era when anything and everything can be bought — so long as you have no scruples and enough money.

Paul M. Weyrich is chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

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