The movie the chattering classes are talking about at the moment is ‘The kids are alright’, about a lesbian couple 
and their children via a sperm donor. It’s based on a true story and the message of the movie is in the title.
According to the Sims IVF clinic here in Ireland, about 15pc of its clients are lesbians and another 15pc are single women. Men may still be needed for their sperm, but who needs them as fathers? The real message of this movie is that the kids certainly don’t.
Of course, the film could as easily been about two homosexual men who used a surrogate mother to have a child on their behalf using the sperm or one or other of them. In this scenario the message would be who needs mothers?
We’re now in the business of deconstructing and reconstructing the family in the name of choice. We’re told there is no ‘normal’ family and to say that there is, is bigotry, no matter what the evidence says. So it’s not ‘normal’ for a child to have a mother and a father, even though every child has a mother and a father, even if the mum is an egg donor or the dad a sperm donor.
But why stop at single parent families or gay and lesbian families if the name of the game is choice? An article in The Boston Globe the other day called ‘Johnny has two mommies and four dads’ [1] sets out all the possibilities.
If a parent is whoever is in a child life, and more than two adults are in a child’s life, then why not expand the maximum number of parents a child can have beyond two? In New Zealand not so long ago it was being mooted that up to five parents could appear on a birth cert namely the egg donor, the sperm donor, the surrogate mother and the two people raising the child.
Once we declare that the child’s biological parents are of no real importance, the possibilities are endless. Why shouldn’t the mother’s ex-boyfriend who lived with her and her children for a couple of years apply to be legally recognised as a parent to those children, and then the boyfriend after that, if he can make a compelling enough case that the children will suffer without him?
Nancy Poliakof, an American academic who wants to completely relativise the meaning of family, says “the law determines what makes someone a legal parent, not marriage, not biology.” So anything goes.
Biology declares that a child can only have two parents and common sense suggests that new parents should only be found for a child when circumstances absolutely demand it.
But if choice is king, and three, four or five people want to be parents to a child, why not if they can find a judge who agrees with them?
Of course, what is really king are the choices adults make. They form relationships, break them, and form new ones and the children just have to fit in and somehow cope with situations whereby numerous adults could have access rights to them, or even custody rights, if a court decides.
What a mess. It makes much more sense to start with the natural, default position of two parents per child – the biological parents, preferably married – and only alter that in extreme circumstances.