AT ONE time, we thought it was better for children to be taken from their mother and reared in an industrial school for the sole reason that the mother was entertaining a gentleman caller and therefore was obviously unfit to rear them, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
At one time, we thought it kinder to conceal all information about their birth mothers from children who were adopted. (Birth fathers? What were they?) At one time, the Australian government thought it was better to take the children of Aborigine parents and have them adopted by white people.
In each case, sometimes after decades, we gradually allowed ourselves to hear the cries of children deprived of their birthright and their heritage. We now accept that no institution can replace a parent, and that it is only in cases of abuse, or danger of severe damage, that we should separate children from parents. We now know that adoptive children, while they love the people that reared them, often have a burning curiosity about the people who physically gave life to them, and a need to know about their kinship networks. We know that nothing, not even recent sincere apologies, will repair the damage done to those Aboriginal children.
Why, then, are we so unwilling to see that we are in danger of creating new injustices and making exactly the same mistakes in new situations as were made in the past?
This week, in the High Court, Mr Justice John Hedigan considered that the biological link between a father and child was not sufficient to warrant custody or access. The father, a gay friend of a lesbian couple, had donated sperm so that one of them could conceive. At first, he agreed to the role of a "favourite uncle", and that the child would know the truth at an appropriate age. In other words, it appears that they all planned to conceal the truth from the child, at least initially.
Who knows what happened then? Perhaps the sheer miraculous reality of his child made the man realise that he was not a favourite uncle, but a father.
Rather than rewarding the man for his desire to be a real parent to his child, in this instance he was dismissed because he had no evidence of family life with the mother to present to the court. The fact that his friends appear to have deliberately excluded any chance of his being allowed to be an active father does not seem to have been taken into account.
The lesbian couple chose donor insemination (DI), a means that heterosexual couples have used for a very long time.
Briton David Gollancz, who is in his fifties, was conceived by DI. He was told by his father when he was 12 and, when older, had the extraordinary experience of discovering half-siblings ranging in age from their 80s to their 40s in the UK, US and Canada. He has been campaigning for an end to donor anonymity since 1994. He said: "When my father told me the truth back in 1965, I felt as though someone was standing in front of me, tearing up my autobiography page by page. Of course, all the things in my story had happened - but the me to whom they had happened was not the me who had been telling himself the story."
Did the judge in this week's case ever wonder what the child would eventually think about the fact that the system blithely decided that the "biological link" was not that significant?
Perhaps he should have listened to voices like David Gollancz, or to Joanna Rose, a young Australian woman who is also a product of DI. She has asked why everyone "flips out" when the wrong baby is taken home from the hospital, but yet it is assumed that donor-conceived children who are intentionally separated from at least half of their genetic heritage will be just fine? She says that "the pain of infertility should not be appeased at the expense of the next generation".
The real issue in this week's case is the right of a child to know and, where possible, to be reared by his or her biological parents. There is also the reality that the child in this case cannot avoid eventually knowing that his mother took a conscious decision to exclude his father from a parenting role.
The Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, which must have found it difficult to comment on this case given that it pitted the rights of lesbian mothers against a gay father, have suggested that family units of three parents should be recognised in these cases.
But where would the line be drawn? Why not four parents, if a gay couple and lesbian couple decided to co-operate in producing children? Why not six, to allow for break-ups and reformed partnerships? We already have ample evidence of how difficult children find it to navigate the two separate emotional worlds of their parents when a couple break up. What will happen to children of three or more parents? The simplest but no longer politically correct solution is to do everything possible to support the chances of children being reared by biological parents, or carefully screened adoptive parents. That means supporting heterosexual marriage, and enabling those who are not married to shoulder the rights and responsibilities of parenthood.
The status of lone fathers needs urgent attention. It is simply unjust that fathers do not have an automatic right to guardianship. It is easy to berate men for their fecklessness, while at the same time denying rights to those who do wish to care for their children.
We need to proceed with extreme caution, especially given how badly we have understood the needs of children in the past. It is one thing to be deprived of a parent through unavoidable circumstances, or death. It is quite another to declare that "de facto parenthood" is entitled to trump the right of a child to know and be reared by a mother and father. It is even worse when the State colludes in the idea that it is acceptable to plan to exclude either a father or a mother from their proper role in a child's life before the child is even conceived. As the most vulnerable party, the rights and needs of the child must come first.