A new article in Glamour magazine boasted about how women are increasingly choosing to take motherhood into their own hands, no longer waiting for men to become mothers. Yet far from being something to celebrate, it only further cements how much children are commodified in today’s culture.
“More and more single millennial women are now seizing back the power and choosing either to become mothers on their own, or not at all – all on their own agenda,” Emily Maddick wrote. “Whereas, yes, previously we were often waiting for ‘Mr Right’ or getting ahead in our careers and fearing solo motherhood as a ‘last resort’, this is no longer the case. As many of us hit our mid-thirties, or sometimes earlier, we’re making friends with our fertility and working with the clock, not against it. We’re recognising the realities that no matter how young you look on the outside, we cannot slow down the fertility aging process – and so are using the resources available to create families at a time that is right for us.”
Maddick then spotlighted women who became Solo Mothers by Choice (SMC) using sperm donors. Virtually all of them spoke about their wants and desires for children – and not how such a decision would affect their children. All of these children are intentionally being created without fathers, and even though it may not be the politically correct thing to say, children need both fathers and mothers in their life; still, it has become trendy for virtually anyone who decides they want to be a parent to use donors and/or a surrogate, and just do it themselves. How will it affect the child? Who cares?
READ: Sperm donor and father of 55 children went on ‘donation tour’ through Europe
And meanwhile, donor sperm is increasingly becoming problematic, as donors rack up hundreds, if not thousands, of children — children who often have no idea what the truth of their conception is, who their father and siblings are, and how many of them are out there.
“When you are commissioning and swiping your credit card for a product, even one that you want badly, you are participating in commodification, regardless of whether the intended parents are the biological parents of the surrogate-born children,” Katie Breckenridge, of child advocacy group Them Before Us, previously told Live Action News. “In this case, the products are human beings.”
A Harvard Medical School study found that 62% of children conceived through donor technologies believe it to be unethical and immoral, and said they felt like business transactions.
“Somehow, somewhere, my parents developed the idea that they deserved to have a baby, and it didn’t matter how much it cost, how many times it took, or how many died in the process,” one woman told Them Before Us. “They deserved a child. And with an attitude like that, by the time I was born they thought they deserved to have the perfect child… as Dad defined a perfect child. And since they deserved a child, I was their property to be controlled, not a person or a gift to be treasured.”
