Fergus Finlay wrote in The Irish Examiner this week about the Children and Family Relationships Bill, and his piece unfortunately follows a familiar template adopted by most of the legislation’s defenders. It goes something like this:
1. Talk about the good bits of the bill
2. Avoid any questions that might be awkward.
3. Assure people that everything’s A-OK, and that anyone who raises any of the questions you’ve just dodged is peddling fear.
Finlay argues that if we pass the Children and Family Relationships Bill, life will go on and the sky won’t fall. OK, sure.
As Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in The Week:
Closely related to appeals to history is the lame observation that the “the sky didn’t fall.” There may be some zealous fools who believe the next step the government takes in a direction they do not like will rend the heavens. But the record of human horrors in the modern world is long, and the number of times the sky has fallen remains at zero.
“Does not cause the sky to fall” is a rather low bar for legislation to meet. I’m happy to acknowledge that the Children and Family Relationships Bill meets it – as does every other policy ever, except perhaps thermonuclear war.
“The sky won’t fall” is just an argumentative device, a cliché – but I’m perplexed as to why Finlay would devote so much of his word count to it. Why not just answer the real objections of the Bill’s opponents, our very simple questions? I’ll list the most relevant ones:
1. Does donor-assisted human reproduction (egg or sperm donation) involve conceiving a child knowing that they will have no relationship with one of their genetic parents?
Elton John, who conceived a child using egg donation and surrogacy, seems to think so. Talking about his son Zachary in 2012, he said in an interview:
“It’s going to be heartbreaking for him to grow up and realise he hasn’t got a mummy.”
Except, of course, that he does – just one who he won’t grow up with: which is, sadly, the plan.
2. Is it a violation of human rights to separate a child from their biological parents because of the wishes of adults?
If not, what on earth is Article 7.1 of the UN Convention on the rights of the child going on about?
The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.
If this isn’t a real right – if “parents” just means “whoever the State says are legal parents” – then a child evidently has no right to know and be cared for by their natural parents. And if that’s the case, what was the problem with forced adoption? Loads of those kids, after all, went to loving families who very much wanted children.
3. Are there any family forms which are better, all else being equal, for child welfare?
Finlay writes at some length about family diversity, accusing opponents of the government’s bill of wanting to return us to some halcyon, Norman Rockwell painting vision of the family. We, he argues, are just refusing to recognise reality.
The thing is, realities change.
The proportion of children being raised by their married biological parents used to be higher than it is now. The numbers changed (why? Finlay doesn’t seem remotely interested). The numbers are higher in some countries than they are in Ireland, and lower than in others. They’re changeable, not fixed in place (unlike the sky).
It’s perfectly legitimate to support diverse family forms while still trying to increase the number of children whoknow and are cared for by their mother and father. Single mothers, seperated or bereaved parents, step-parents and adoptive parents can all do fantastic jobs raising children. But they’re all responding to situations where a child is not being raised by their own two biological parents in a committed relationship. Something has gone wrong – a death, a relationship breakup, a failure of one or more parents to commit, or other tragic circumstances.
To put it another way, is the love of one parent, two parents of the same sex, and the love of the child’s own mother and father exactly the same?
Does it make no difference to the child?
I don’t know what Finlay’s answer to that is. But if it’s “nope, all you need is love” then he’s arguing that motherhood has no special value, nor does fatherhood, nor do the natural ties, nor does having two loving parents instead of one – because being raised by your own biological mother and father adds absolutely nothing to the child’s life compared with any other parenting situation.
The strange thing is that Finlay wrote a really great article the week before talking about another “reality”: that of child poverty. He detailed the deleterious consequences to childern of growing up poor. But I wonder how he’d react to data like this?
Adjusted for parental education, child’s race, sex, age, and vocabulary test score in childhood.
Adjusting for parental socioeconomic status and psychological history, as well as child age and family size.
(Via the Institute for Family Studies)
These figures are from Sweden, a country much better at dealing with child poverty than we are. And yet the pattern persists of single parent families being more likely to have negative outcomes in a variety of than two-parent families. Why does Finlay, who’s done such great work working for child welfare at Barnardos, never mention this, or all the other data that points to the same conclusion?
Every child has a mother and a father. My proposal is, simply, that we should try to ensure that as many people as possible have their right to know and be cared for by that mother and father vindicated.
That means removing marriage penalties from our social welfare system, and changing our tax system to support and incentivise marriage, as many other European countries do. It means trying to support marriage through education and public campaigns. And it certainly means that we shouldn’t legislate for donor-assisted reproductive technologies that separate children from one or both of their genetic parents in every case, and then write into our law the idea that these genetic fathers and mothers are not, in fact, parents, and have “no parental rights or duties” towards their children, other than to provide them with some info when they turn 18 and their childhood is already over. Knowledge is not enough: the right is to know and be cared for by their parents, where possible.
If we do pass the Bill unamended, we won’t cause the sky to fall. We’ll just take a concrete step away from making the best interests of the child paramount in our laws, and give the State’s seal of approval to the human rights violations that are egg and sperm donation. And that’s quite bad enough.
