Well if what is happening in the UK at the moment is any guide, the interests of adults will trump the welfare of children.

Like many countries the UK introduced a law requiring sperm donors to be able to be indentified later on to their children. Rightly, this was seen as fundamental to the rights of children to know their origins. It was and should be an uncontroversial notion.

In the UK and elsewhere this has caused the sperm supply to dry up, so to speak. Men suddenly confronted with the knowledge their offspring could knock on the door 20 years later aren't too keen on donating anymore.

Well, you'd think society was intelligent enough to join the dots and see that these events show that separating children from their biological parents is a bad idea and should be discouraged. That allowing men to jettison their responsibilities to their children is wrong. Yes, we know it happens through divorce and other circumstances, but just because it happens, doesn't mean we should promote it.

But instead, the Blair government is now seriously suggesting reintroducing anonymity for sperm donors!

So there you have it. A good law that is transparently in the interests of children gets shafted as soon as it comes up against the "rights" of adults.

Moving away from a natural law approach to social institutions is dangerous. The natural law approach to this issue is that a man and a woman constitute a couple their offspring with them form a family. This has been the case since the beginning of history, with some exceptions in various cultures. When we let the state decide what marriage is we give unprecedented power to the state.

It seems that the "needs of the child" concept has become one of those issues which society happily uses when convenient but ditches as it suits.

How well have we done at separating the difference between needs and wants?
- A person may "need" to know the genetic and health history of both parents to help them better address their own health issues.
- Is a wish to know your roots a need or a want?
- Is there a way to manage the childs needs and wants without trampling all over adults needs (or wants)?
- Do we take those needs as seriously in other situations? If so why is paternity testing opposed by some who also seem to think fathers should be responsible?

We do need to meet the needs of the child but if they are needs we should endeavor to ensure that those same needs are met for all children, not just some children.

R0bert

The clash is not between adults rights and childrens needs this is a furphy. The clash is between the wealthy who want more work out of already overworked people, and the capacity for a human being to deliver more. Missing out are the children, who never see their parents or interact with them as the parents are exhausted. It is only a matter of time when the only solution for the wealthy will be to lower the working age, and make child labour legal.

it is very useful to know if you have inherited a genetic predisposition to diabetes, short sightedness, or if an illness is likely to emerge in later years.

Its nice to know you have your grandparents gait, intelligence and facial expressions - but you can live without that knowledge.

If I was considering donating genetic material I wouldn't like to know that the offspring could appear on my doorstep and demand the same rights of inheritance and support as my socially defined family. In fact if in doubt - don't!

I think that the sort of obligations the biological parent has to these children needs to be clearly spelt out and limits placed on what the children can access.

As a suggestion perhaps children produced by these techniques could have exactly the same rights to access to their natural parents as children who were adopted in former times.

By this time next year the words “mother” and “father” may no longer have any meaning in the UK.

At present the IVF laws in the UK state that a child has a right to a mother and a father, but various feminist groups have opposed this saying that a child should only have a right to a “parent”. This would then allow lesbian women or heterosexual single women to have children through IVF, and such legislation may spread to other countries.

Those that like to call themselves a mother or a father had best practice calling themselves a mother or a father because groups of feminist are now saying that they can’t. In the future a mother or a father can only call themselves a parent.

I agree with Shonga. This is a good example of why we face a class problem, whilst thinking amongst terrorism & other things, that its a gender one. Our corporate bosses know too well that the strength of the working class has always been family. Undeniably, it was feminism that started the modern process of seperating natural parenthood from social parenthood, albeit to protect battered wives & children. Treating this social problem as a gender issue was the first mistake as the broader, class paradigm seeks to seperate & exploit the individual. It is quick to exploit notions that contribute to greater legislation of working class lives & unfortunately, myths of the great unwashed's uncontrollable penchants for wife bashing, child abuse & so on, only help the process along.
There is no telling where it will stop when one considers cloning.

I believe that the family unit is the building block of what is commonly called “society”.

I hold a perception that the state is the servant of the family unit and does not rate even as an inadequate surrogate parent.

I would observe that statistically, a miniscule percentage of children are born in any manner other than through the natural exchange of bodily fluids between the parents.

I do not believe in enacting laws to extend the rights of a tiny minority which may interfere in the private interactions of the vast majority of families.

The author, rightly asks “What role should the state have in defining parenthood?”

The answer, None.

Parenthood is a private process best defined by parents and not by statute. Parenthood describes the unconditional love and sense of protection and which parents feel for their own offspring. It cannot be defined or describe as a state function (of duty) because a state can never offer anything “unconditionally”. If a state could ”love” it would only do so “conditionally” because “the state” can only offer to each, equally and objectively.

To the questions “Do mothers and fathers matter to children? Is there anything special - anything worth supporting - about the two-person, mother-father model? Are children commodities to be produced by the marketplace?”

From my own experience as a child, I would suggest parents do matter and as a parent, I am informed, through word and deed, regularly by my children how much I matter.

Reflecting on Lenin’s experiments in family engineering, back in 1920s the mother-father-child(ren) model is special and is worth supporting.
I have often wondered about the lack of intimacy, nurture and esteem which orphans may miss out on and the wondering they may feel about their absent natural parents. Just thinking of that, confirms for me the special intangible quality which parents contribute in the development of their children and its importance for the growth of the child into a fully functioning individual.

Commonsense (and antislavery laws) deem children are not commodities of trade.

Col,
I agree with your comment, but wish to add that bif parenting is a problem, as it can be for some parents, the State can and does run parenting courses, which I have seen to be beneficial to some people.

That should be the extent of State involement in family matters, the parenting courses are and should remain an option, in my humble opinion.

Col and Shonga, indeed! The deep contradictions inherent between the state playing mad scientist games (for their industry masters) and not looking after children already in their care (orphans, kids at risk,) are just too many to mention here.

Col, I particularly liked the way you described a shag as 'exchanging bodily fluids'. Very Victorian and gentlemanly of you old chap.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. Who says that children's needs are not being met if they have two mothers or two fathers? My sense of it is that if a gay couple go to the effort required to acquire themselves a family, they are probably going to do a hell of a better job raising that child than the teens who accidentally conceived behind some shelter shed. Hetrosexuals don't have a monopoly on the ability to provide love, care and a stable, nuturing environment - which is what matters to a child.

Yet the nuclear family of a mum and dad and kids, living alone in one house is a relatively new and modern phenomenon.
Among the hill tribes of Thailand, mums and dads work in fields all day and grandparents and older children care for the young ones. This was the way we all lived, once,because all adult hands were needed for the collection of food.
Also, in our recent past, women often died bearing kids, that's why there are so many stepmothers in fairy tales - because there were so many stepmothers in real life, and children were often raised by siblings or members of their extended families.
Richer children were sent -often long distances - to be raised by other families in the hope they would form important political or economic alliances, and poorer children were indentured as apprentices or as domestic servants, often at very tender ages.
More recently, in upper class homes, children were raised by servants, seeing their parents for about an hour a day in the evening. Sending small children away to school at a tender age was very common ( my own husband was flown to england to boarding school at the age of 6 from jamaica.) And, only a few centuries ago, upper class babies were sent to wet-nurses almost at birth so their mothers wouldn't have to breast feed. The children often remained with their wet nurse till they were 2 or 3, before being wrenched away from the only mother and home they'd known, because they were now more likely to actually survive. Tudor children were often betrothed at birth and married at 12. Mary Queen of Scots was sent to france at 2 to be brought up in the home of her betrothed; the even younger dauphin.
Families have changed their shapes and habits throughout human history according to the needs, fashions and constraints of the time, so its important not to idealise their current shape too much. It is likely to do its fair share of changing too.

Zwicky your right that hetrosexuals don't have a monopoly on the ability to provide love, care and a stable, nurturing environment for children. But they DO have a monopoly on being the natural parents of their children. And although feminists and lesbians continually say that biological connections between child and parent are of no value, the evidence would indicate that it is of value to both parents and child. That being the case why would an adult who claims to love a child deliberately manipulate the family structure to deliberately deny that child a proper relationship with both its natural parents. The answer of course is found in the feminist mantra - "It's all about me, it's all about me, it's all about me".