The growing trend across the Western world of devaluing the importance of biological mothers and fathers has been sharply criticised in an important new report.

Entitled ‘One Parent or Five? A Global Look at Today’s New Intentional Families’, the report challenges assumptions that “intentional parenthood”, resulting from surrogacy and sperm or egg donations, is good for children “simply because it is planned in advance of the child’s conception.”

The author, Elizabeth Marquardt writes that intentional parenthood “has been elevated as a good by family diversity leaders who have long fought to make their case for the equal value of all family structures, despite the reality of messy divorces, stressed-out remarriages, and unplanned births to struggling single moms”.

She says that family diversity advocates “now discover among lesbians and gays using artificial reproductive technologies a realm of peace and order, intention and planning—where no child can fall into that dreaded category of personhood: the accident”.

However, the study highlights that children born by sperm or egg donors often experience identity issues and can feel more isolated from their families.

Compared to those raised by their biological parents, donor offspring suffer more often from addiction, delinquency, and depression, according to the study.

The report also says that family structure is important.

The report says: “Having a married mother and father is correlated with increased physical and mental health, as well as general life happiness, academic and intellectual performance, behavioral success at school, and graduation from college.

“These children are also more likely to build successful family relationships when they reach adulthood. Children growing up with married mothers and fathers are less likely to live in poverty and suffer its related problems.

“They are also less likely to suffer from physical or sexual abuse, abuse drugs or alcohol, become involved in criminal or violent behavior, or engage in early sexual activity and premarital childbearing.”

According to the report, many children deliberately deprived of a father, or mother, by parents who wanted them, are outraged.

It says that the impact of not knowing who one’s father or mother because this knowledge was denied one by one’s social parents is not the same as losing a father through bereavement, or even through “accidental” single motherhood or divorce. It is experienced as a direct attack on a child’s rights.

The report concludes by asking: “Do children do fine with one parent, or 58 three, or five? Do young people mourn the absence of their biological mothers and fathers in their lives? Can three-person units be as stable as admittedly already-fragile two-person units?

“Is there something special about trying to keep the man and woman who make the baby together, for the sake of the baby and each other, in what we call marriage? Are children commodities we commission to appease adult desires, or are they vulnerable creatures with individual human dignity, whose needs must come first?”