Among the more appealing aspects of teaching family law is that I often use examples “ripped from the headlines” as a starting point for discussion. And one of the most fruitful examples over the past several months has been the story of Nadya Suleman and her 14 children. Their situation is brimming with issues ranging from medical ethics to psychopathology. The one I want to focus on here is parenting and gender.
In case you somehow missed it, Suleman is the California woman who has given birth to 14 children (eight of them in one well-choreographed feat of medical virtuosity), all of them conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF). She is described in various news stories as a “single mother.” But at the end of February, a man named Denis Beaudoin came forward claiming to be the “father” of all 14 children and asked for a paternity test to prove it. He also offered to help support the children, whether or not the DNA testing confirmed his claim.
This is a curious turn of events. Under California law, a man who provides sperm for IVF is not legally the father of any children so conceived unless he is married to the mother. Indeed, there is a presumption that the husband of a woman who has given birth is the father of the child.
When her first six children were born, Suleman was married to Marcus Gutierrez — although subsequent divorce papers say they had been separated since January 2000. The birth certificates of the four oldest children list a third man as the father, David Salomon, later described by Suleman as a platonic friend and sperm donor.
Which still doesn’t answer the question, “Do these children have a father?” And whether they do or don’t, why do we care?
In the case of the octuplets and their six siblings, the question about fatherhood is often lumped together with concerns about financial support. This default assumption — that mothers provide nurturing while fathers provide money — underlies our culture’s gendered understanding of parental roles.
Sometimes, as when the state is trying to recoup public assistance payments, we have no qualms about labeling as “father” a man who has done little more than contribute his genetic material and has had no interaction with the child. (A woman who similarly abandons her child, on the other hand, risks being branded as “unfit” and having her parental rights terminated.)
The advantage of a purely genetic definition of fatherhood is that there always will be someone in the role — no children will be fatherless. More to the point, there always will be someone to turn to for support.
While this definition of fatherhood may have some instrumental value, gaining the state access to some funds, it also drains the term “father” of most of its potential meaning. This does not encourage men to fully engage in parenting. After all, if a man who has never seen his child, and who contributes to the child’s welfare only if ordered by the state, is nevertheless the child’s father,1 why should he be expected to do more?
There are, of course, real biological differences between men and women, and those real differences dictate different roles in conception and birth. Leaving aside assisted reproductive technology, a man’s contribution to creating a child is qualitatively different from a woman’s. But the fact of pregnancy does not mean that only women can nurture children or that only men can be the breadwinners.
All of us know men who are deeply involved in the lives of their children and who fully encompass the ideal of parenthood. Whether these men are genetically connected to their children or not, we readily and rightly recognize them as fathers. Do they really belong in the same category with men who are genetically related but otherwise uninvolved? If both types of behavior qualify a man as a father, then there are surely children out there with two fathers — one by genetics and one by conduct.
The notion that a child should have a “father” also reflects a preference for two parents, overlaid by the assumption that if one parent is female (i.e., a mother) the other parent must be male (i.e., a father). While having two parents may be desirable, there is no evidence that having one of each is necessarily better for the child than having two mothers or two fathers. The concept of “fatherlessness” implies that there is something missing, even if the child has never known a father — and even if the child has two parents, neither of whom happens to be male.
So, back to the Suleman siblings. Do they have a “father?” Could they perhaps, like Sophie in “Mamma Mia!”, have three fathers? (From a financial perspective, that might be the best result, since it’s highly unlikely any of the potential dads will individually have the wherewithal to make a dent in the octuplets’ hospital bill, let alone ongoing expenses for the whole brood.) And why do we care? At some point, the children may want to know who contributed half of their genetic material, but that is their concern, not ours.
On balance, I think our national obsession with fatherlessness and with finding a father for every child is misguided, especially when it elevates biology over behavior. The person who stays up in the night with a sick child, who goes to soccer games and school plays, who does some or all of the million things it takes to raise a child, that person is a “parent.”
Prof. Julie Shapiro teaches Family Law, Family Formation, Law and Sexuality, and Civil Procedure at Seattle University School of Law. Her family law blog, “Related Topics,” can be found at julieshapiro.wordpress.com.
1 Here I am referring to men who have willfully abandoned a child. I mean to cast no aspersions on men whose situation (e.g., active military service) precludes them from being involved in child rearing.
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