Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

being stranger than philosophical fiction, an internet forum for fathers campaigning for parental rights when marriages dissolve has seen messages advocating for an artificial womb – because it would free fathers from the tyranny of those mothers who keep men apart from their children.

The cultural divide between mothers and fathers appears to be closing, at least in some parts of the world. Two generations ago, fathers were not as hands-on and engaged with child-rearing as they are today. There hasn’t been a change in the biology of sex in that time; the change has come through our culture, including the tools available to us to equalize the distribution of labour (in the sense of work). When an artificial womb becomes available, an equal distribution of labour (in the sense of childbirth) will finally be within reach. This will mean that women will be freed from the dangers of pregnancy and will be able to work productively throughout gestation; it will also give men an essential tool towards being able to have a child entirely without a woman, should they choose. But it also means we will have to consider the most basic questions of gender: why are the roles of mother and father still seen as different to most people on the planet? Why can’t a man be a ‘mother’? Why do we care so much about what it means to be a ‘mother’ rather than to be a ‘parent’?

By all reasonable estimates, in the near future we will conquer the tyranny of time and the tyranny of the womb. The question remains if we can also conquer the tyranny of human prejudice too.

9

GOING SOLO

There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.

José Saramago, interview with the Guardian, April 2006

The UK Office for National Statistics’ 2012 study of lone parents with dependant children reports that the traditional family household of a married couple with a child or children is now three times less common than it was just a generation ago. Families headed by only one parent comprise twenty-five percent of households in the UK and twenty-eight percent in the US, and in the US, the so-called nuclear family now accounts for fewer than twenty-five percent of households, compared to forty percent in 1970.

The majority of single-parent families are created by circumstance – separation, divorce or the death of a partner. Recent decades have also seen the rise, however, of the solo parent, a name used to distinguish these single-parents-by-choice from other single-parent families where a two-adult household has been broken apart, often with economic consequences, and for that reason is often associated with disadvantage and, sometimes, pity.

Not so solo parents, who are generally, at this moment in reproductive history, single women in good financial circumstances who are approaching or just past the menopause, and who have made a conscious decision to use advanced technology to go it alone. These women have not necessarily experienced infertility problems; instead, they turn to assisted conception techniques in order to have a child of their own without a partner. The families that result are not always a solo mother and a solo child alone. Some solo parents want to give a sibling to an only child who may or may not have been the product of a partner’s sperm.

Because of their age, many solo parents must use more than one reproductive technology when they decide to have a child. A woman nearing menopause and lacking a male partner will, for instance, usually need a donated egg, donated sperm, and in vitro fertilization to bring the two together and then successfully implant them in her womb. On some levels, such a pregnancy is natural – it’s just that all of the bits and pieces are happening outside the usual conception. The family that results isn’t related genetically, but its members are related biologically. The births mimic everything that happens when a man and a woman have a child. In some cases, the solo mother might try to find donors that will provide genetic material that, on the surface, appears to be their own, making it impossible for the person on the street (or at the nursery) to distinguish a solo-parent family from more ‘traditional’ types. Indeed, while most solo mothers say they plan to tell their children that their father is a sperm donor, many admit that they probably will not tell their children that the egg that made them was donated too. We still put a great deal of emphasis on the meaning of that genetic contribution, after all, and the desire to become a parent is wrapped up in those definitions.

How does this affect the welfare of the children? So far, research has focused on the effects of growing up fatherless, and most of it involves households where a single-parent family has been created by force, not by choice. Yes, there are negative consequences for a child’s cognitive, social, and emotional development when economic hardship, parental conflict, or parental death is part of the family story. But these effects should not be generalized to include children born into solo-mother families. From the early accounts, children of solo parents experience neither trauma (from the break-up of the family) nor financial hardship. For many, in fact, the situation is quite the opposite.

Although there have been few studies of solo parents, a remarkably consistent theme emerges in the interviews that have been conducted: the women (and solo parents are almost always women, given the limits of today’s technology) realized that they had no other viable options for becoming a mother. Time was running out, and they had no long-term partner in their sights. The risk of having a child through a casual sexual liaison was too great, be it the