A Child by Any Means Necessary is Not a Right

There seems to be some confusion in the minds of the Government over the importance of fathers.

Firstly, in 2004 the Government provided regulations to encourage parental responsibility and visibility by removing donor anonymity and allowing donor conceived children to access the identity of donors involved in their conception.

Secondly, the Government has rightly emphasised in their policies, the need for male role models in terms of social cohesion, in order to reduce under achievement, to avoid increasing violent crime and gang culture.

Now under current proposals the Government intends to remove the current 'requirement for a father' provision from section 13(5) of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. Such proposals create a false dichotomy which seeks to place 'the welfare and needs of the child' against a child's 'requirement for a father'. .

Since when did these become competing requirements ? Is it not self-evident that 'the welfare and needs of a child' are enhanced and met when there is a father present as against there being no father at all?

There is all the difference in the world between a child who finds themselves in a single parent family through bereavement or breakdown of parental relationship, and those who find themselves in this situation by design. And this is precisely what the Government proposes in this bill: the removal, by design, of the father of the child.

We know already that there are men who have been moved by particular legal circumstances to form the "Fathers for Justice" group. When one removes from their campaign their pranks and their purported attempts to kidnap Leo Blair, one discovers that the founder of the movement was forced into campaigning because overnight he was denied access to a child whom he dearly loved and who he believed loved and needed him.

And now we have a Bill in which the Government is set to remove – as a statement of public policy – the requirement for the need of a father.

The right of a prospective parent to a child by any means necessary must not triumph over the welfare of children who are brought into the world as a result of the treatment as authorised under the current legislation. To do so would be to enshrine in law that the right to have a child should take precedence over the welfare of the child itself.

The Government is bowing to the argument that as single people and gay and lesbian couples can legally adopt, so the same permission must therefore be given if they wish to 'commission' a child using IVF.

This is a non sequitur because the situations are markedly different. In adoption, the hospitality of a home is being offered to an already existing child who has had the misfortune through circumstance or necessity to lose or be removed from contact with its parents. Bringing the care of an adoptive home to a needy child is a wholly different circumstance to deciding in advance to use IVF technology to bring into the world a child who will, 'by design', never have a father.

If discrimination is indeed the issue here, then surely the greater discrimination is in ensuring that a child will never have any chance of knowing its natural father. I consider that the child's right not to be deliberately deprived of having a father is greater than any right to "commission" a child by IVF. As the Government has previously acknowledged, "the welfare of children cannot always be adequately protected by concern for the interests of the adults involved".

There is an unhealthy seam of rampant individualism at the heart of this Bill, rooted in a consumerist mentality where the science that allows something to happen is transformed into the right to have it.

The "cogito ergo sum" of Descartes – I think therefore I am – becomes the consumerist mantra - I shop therefore I am: "Tesco ergo sum". The competing individualist arias of "I, I, I" and "me, me, me" provide the mood music for an individualism that posits the right of a wannabe parent over the welfare of a child.

The law is a statement of public policy. This is not about messages which are sent about what is or isn't acceptable in terms of family arrangements, but more fundamentally about the roles of parents, and in particular the need for a father wherever possible.

This is an edited extract from a Speech delivered in the House of Lords during the Second Reading of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill 2007. The full speech can be seen at:

http://www.dioceseofyork.org.uk/cgi/news/news.cgi?t=template&a=1203