Mother’s Day in Ireland was marked last Sunday, but what are we now marking on that day given the radically new view of the family and of parenthood that exists in Irish law following the passage last year of the marriage referendum and the Children and Family Relationships Act? Instead of celebrating ‘Mother’s Day’ and ‘Father’s Day’, should we be celebrating a generic, gender-neutral ‘Parent’s Day’ instead?
Between them, the marriage referendum and the Children and Family Relationships Act have introduced a radically new legal regime whereby it is now possible, with the full blessing of the State, to bring into being, as a matter of deliberate design, children who will be raised without a mother in some cases, and a father in others. This will often be achieved through a combination of egg or sperm donation plus surrogacy (soon to be regulated).
It is an absolute declaration that motherhood has no special value to a child and neither does fatherhood. Other countries [1] have gone down this same path and have consequently removed the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from official forms in favour of gender neutral terms.
With the gender-neutral view of marriage which we have now adopted, has come a gender-neutral view of parenting as well. We are told that the sex of those who marry is no longer a consideration, and we are told that the sex of those who wish to be parents doesn’t matter either.
We are told that a child doesn’t need or deserve a loving mother as such, or a loving father, just loving parents, or a loving parent.
So what are we now celebrating on Mother’s Day? Obviously we are celebrating the mothers who raised us. But clearly we are not celebrating motherhood per se, because to do this would be a declaration that there is something important and distinct about motherhood itself, something that is different and distinct from fatherhood.
We can’t possibly do this after we have been told that children don’t need mothers as such, or fathers as such in our new world of ‘Modern Families’ where ‘loving parents’ or a ‘loving parent’ is all that is deemed to matter, and the differences between mothers and fathers are deemed irrelevant.
(PS. Last Friday night, The Late Late Show interviewed two men who paid a surrogate mother in America to have children for them. That was an interesting way for RTE to mark Mother’s Day weekend)