There was an excellent article in The Irish Independent magazine on Saturday that dealt with the trials and tribulations of conceiving children through the use of donor-sperm.

There are more ethical problems attaching to this than you can shake a stick at and Breda O’Brien wrote a paper for us on some of those problems that we published last year. The paper is called ‘Making Babies: towards a child-centred view of Assisted Human Reproduction’.

At the heart of the debate about egg and sperm donation is whether it is right to deliberately deprive a child of his or her biological mother and/or father, and in the case of single women, single men (think Cristiano Ronaldo who recently used a surrogate mother to have a child) and same-sex couples, whether it is right to deliberately deprive a child of either a mother or a father as the case may be.

The centrepiece of the article was an interview with Canadian-based Irish writer, Emma Donoghue who has had two children with her lesbian partner via an anonymous sperm donor.

In this scenario, the children will suffer a triple loss; the loss of any contact with their biological father; the fact that they will never even know his name; the fact that they won’t be raised by a father. (The same would have happened if Emma was a single mother so her lesbianism is really beside the point).

Of course, there are people who will deny that such children suffer any loss at all, but they should try telling that to the thousands of donor-offspring, now in adulthood, who are desperately searching for their biological parents.

They should also tell it to all those children who have never had a father in their lives.

In any event, Donoghue is dismissive of the need for a father, as you would expect given what she has done. She tells The Irish Independent: “Does [having a father figure] mean a male parent or someone to learn a masculine social role model from? My son seems to be getting his sense of what a boy is, and what a man is, from his wide social circle and from TV; he doesn’t need a man actually living in the house for that.”

In the US it took about 20 years to more or less persuade policy-makers in the debate about lone mother families that children usually benefit from having a father around as well.

But now, in order to pacify the gay lobby, this notion has been thrown out the window again and people like Emma Donoghue can say with a perfectly straight face that a wide social circle, plus TV, can make up for the absence of a father. Are we fathers really that superfluous?