More Than Love
Feminists, Homosexual Activists and Sexual Revolutionists would have us believe that love is all you need. Who needs men, fathers or responsibility? Whether by divorce, death or design, among all the tragedies that are inherent in our human experience, the absence of a loving, committed dad is one of the most common.
From “21 Reasons Why Gender Matters” by the Fatherhood Foundation
#4 “The masculine gender is an essential ingredient for fatherhood, and children raised by a committed father
do much better in life.”
Men and women are different, and both bring unique qualities to parenthood. Fatherhood is indispensable, and is premised on masculinity, maleness, being a man. Research is quite clear that children need a loving father to protect, defend and guide them. Children growing up without fathers experience numerous problems, including:
- an increased risk of being involved in crime and criminal activities
- a greater likelihood of involvement in illicit drug use, alcohol consumption and tobacco use
- a greater chance of committing suicide
- a greater likelihood of developing mental health problems
- an increased risk of sexual promiscuity and other sexual problems, including, gender confusion issues
- an increased risk of becoming a victim of child sexual abuse
- a greater chance of growing up poor or in poverty
Due to the enormous efforts of highly devoted, hard-working mothers and/or others brought in to aid them, children who grow up without fathers do not always experience these negative outcomes, but generally speaking, such problems are the usual result of growing up in fatherless families. The research on this has become quite extensive and persuasive.
Indeed, so much research on the negative impact of fatherlessness has accumulated over the years that a number of book-length summaries have been written to cover all the data. There has also been a large amount of Australian data to back up this international research.
Two Canadian studies suggest that there is much more to masculinity than testosterone. While testosterone is certainly important in driving men to conceive a child, it takes an array of other hormones to turn men into fathers. And among the best fathers, it turns out, testosterone levels actually drop significantly after the birth of a child. If manhood includes fatherhood, which it does for a majority of men, then testosterone is hardly the ultimate measure of masculinity.
In fact, the second of the two studies, which was recently published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, suggests that fathers have higher levels of estrogen, the well-known female sex hormone, than other men. The research shows that men go through significant hormonal changes alongside their pregnant partners, changes most likely initiated by their partner’s pregnancy, and ones that even cause some men to experience pregnancy-like symptoms such as nausea and weight gain.
It seems increasingly clear that just as nature prepares women to be committed mothers, it prepares men to be devoted fathers.
The broader issue of how children thrive in a biological two-parent family also ties in here. Most often when the two-parent family is not found, it is the father who is missing. Thus single-parent families are overwhelmingly headed by overworked and overtaxed mothers. The research on these sorts of households shows the negative outcomes for children. And again, the research is massive, with good summaries of the data now available. Moreover, the Australia data replicates the findings from overseas.
The various ways in which children need, and thrive with, a father cannot be recounted here. But just one small example can be offered: fathers are essential in playing with their children, especially boys, in what is known as rough and tumble play. This enables boys to sublimate their excess energy and use their muscles in a socially acceptable way. One of the reasons for so much anti-social behaviour by boys – vandalism, street fighting, gangs, etc. – is because of father-absence. In single mother families, the mothers do their best, but cannot substitute for the absent father.
Indeed, one youth worker who has counselled many hundreds of delinquent young males has noted that the reason they tend to gravitate toward gangs and violence and drugs is precisely because of being brought up in father-absent households. He says that “almost 100 per cent” of these kids are from “single parent families or blended families”.
Thus maleness and fathers are indispensable to the well being of society and the healthy development of children.
That’s the research perspective. This next is the child’s perspective. I came across this article from the Washington Post. Kids are more than trophies or proof of family status. There’s no adequate substitution for a loving father in the home. —Beetle Blogger
My Father Was an Anonymous Sperm Donor
Sunday, December 17, 2006; Page B01
I really wasn’t expecting anything the day, earlier this year, when I sent an e-mail to a man whose name I had found on the Internet. I was looking for my father, and in some ways this man fit the bill. But I never thought I’d hit pay dirt on my first try. Then I got a reply — with a picture attached.
From my computer screen, my own face seemed to stare back at me. And just like that, after 17 years, the missing piece of the puzzle snapped into place.
The puzzle of who I am.
I’m 18, and for most of my life, I haven’t known half my origins. I didn’t know where my nose or jaw came from, or my interest in foreign cultures. I obviously got my teeth and my penchant for corny jokes from my mother, along with my feminist perspective. But a whole other part of me was a mystery.
That part came from my father. The only thing was, I had never met him, never heard any stories about him, never seen a picture of him. I didn’t know his name. My mother never talked about him — because she didn’t have a clue who he was.
When she was 32, my mother — single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family — allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child.
And for a while, I was pretty angry about it.
I was angry at the idea that where donor conception is concerned, everyone focuses on the “parents” — the adults who can make choices about their own lives. The recipient gets sympathy for wanting to have a child. The donor gets a guarantee of anonymity and absolution from any responsibility for the offspring of his “donation.” As long as these adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?
Not so. The children born of these transactions are people, too. Those of us in the first documented generation of donor babies — conceived in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when sperm banks became more common and donor insemination began to flourish — are coming of age, and we have something to say.
I’m here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn’t ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It’s hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won’t matter to the “products” of the cryobanks’ service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.
We offspring are recognizing the right that was stripped from us at birth — the right to know who both our parents are.
And we’re ready to reclaim it. rest of the story here at the Washington Post
