More Marriage and Parenthood

Once again, Nebraska intervened and pulled me off-track, but this time I’ve come back much more promptly.    You can go back to here to pick up this thread.    But to briefly sum up–it is generally presumed that the husband of a woman who gives birth (assuming of course that she is married) is the father of the child.   That means he can generally assert a claim to be a legal parent based on the fact of their marriage.   (And as discussed before, this would be the case for a woman married to another woman in MA or CA as well.)

The last post asserts that this is not necessarily because we think/hope that the man in question is actually the source of the genetic material used to create the child.   Indeed, the presumption applies in instances when we know he is NOT the source of the DNA (ART using donor sperm).  Plus, if the critical factor were the DNA, these days it would be pretty straightforward to just test the DNA.   Then we’d know for sure.

So if it isn’t because of an assumption about DNA, why have a presumption that husband (or more generally spouse) is father/parent?   Last time I suggested it might be because of the relationship between the spouse and the woman who gives birth.  

Coda to a Coda

One last time (I think) the Nebraska story–perhaps now a saga–is in the news.   When I last commented on this, Nebraska was pretty clearly going to change the law allowing parents to drop off children of any age at a hospital emergency room.   Now it appears that this change will be made in a special session of the legislature, at a cost of $80,000.   It’s urgent because people really are travelling from out of state to drop off kids in Nebraska.   Or maybe just because too many people are using the law’s provisions.

I continue to ponder why it is okay to drop off a newborn but not okay to drop off a teenager.  In both cases, parenting can be challenging.   My latest thought is that the differential treatment reflects a sort of cost/benefit analysis.   In any of these cases, one of the things you have to weigh is the relative harm to the child or children involved.  There’s probably some harm on both sides in these cases–harm to the child in staying in a home where the parents feel so thoroughly overwhelmed vs. harm to the child from being abandoned.   With a newborn, the risk of harm in staying in the home with the overwhelmed parent may be greater–newborns are helpless and fragile and could easily be endangered in this setting.

At the same time, I’d venture to say that the harm from abandonment is less for a newborn.   I do not mean to deny that there is harm here (and I am quick to say this lest I be taken as too cavalier).   But being rejected/abandoned by a person who has been your parent for ten/twelve/fourteen years seems to me to have a qualitatively different impact from being rejected/abandoned by a person who has spent a good deal less time with you.

Perhaps it is this calculus that lies behind the greater willingness to tolerate abandonment of newborns than teenagers.

Marriage and Parentage–Picking Up the Dropped Ball

Over a month ago I had a post about the link between marriage and parenthood.   At the end I said “I’ll start that next time,” but alas, I did no such thing.  I got completely distracted by the whole Nebraska thing.   While I think it may be understandable, and therefore perhaps forgivable, I do want to go back and pick up that dropped topic.   (I rather hope someone out there wants me to as well, but never mind that.)   Since I raised it again in the last post, this seems like a good time to do it.

To begin, let me remind you of what the subject of discussion.   There’s an ancient presumption that when a married woman gives birth to a child, her husband is the legal father of the child.  This presumption endures to this day, with some modifications to protect men from unwanted fatherhood.

I wonder if this is actually the most common basis on which men claim or are assigned legal parentage.    We generally identify the woman who gives birth (of course she is also the woman who was pregnant) as mother.  (The exceptions to this rule I can think of have to do with surrogacy, which I’ve discussed at length elsewhere.)  But we do not routinely DNA test infants and the adults surround them, so how do we assign the role of legal father?   Usually, if the woman is married, it is assigned to the husband.  If the woman is not married, things become more complicated. 

Adding Factors?

[Note:  This semester's teaching schedule is wreaking havoc with my ability to post as I would like.   I hope to get this in hand in the coming week--you can watch and see how I do.  Meantime, I ask your indulgence for the irregular nature of these posts.  Sigh.]

A recently posted comment points to recent research that men awaiting the birth of a child to their wives undergo significant hormonal changes during her pregnancy.   The comment goes on to observe that “the biology of fatherhood is therefore more than just DNA”   This raises a couple of interesting points, one of which I want to take on here.

Consider the scenario described here.    The man in question has three potential bases on which to claim parenthood.

First, he is married to the pregnant woman.   This is a traditional basis for claiming legal parenthood, even when we know DNA links the child to another man.

Second, I’m going to assume he has a genetic link to the child, by which I mean he is the source of the DNA.  I think that is implicit in the scenario, though it isn’t outright stated.    (I do wonder if he’d have those hormonal changes without the genetic link.  My guess is that he would, that the hormonal changes are attributed to exposure to the hormones of the pregnant woman, or something like that, and are not specifically tied to the genetic make-up of the soon-to-be-born child. )  The genetic basis for parenthood is well-recognized, even if it is sometimes at odds with (and sometimes subordinated to) the marriage basis above.   

News In Brief: Nebraska Coda

I’ve written several times about recent developments in Nebraska.   Some time over the summer, Nebraska enacted a law that allowed parents to drop their children off at certain designated locations (hospital emergency rooms, fire stations, that sort of thing) without facing charges of abandonment or neglect.    A number of states have similar laws (I discuss this in more detail here).   They are usually designed to ensure that newborns are not left on doorsteps or in dumpsters.

The thing that distinguished Nebraska law was that it didn’t seem to have an age limit.  Suddenly parents were dropping off teenagers.  Indeed, people were travelling to Nebraska from out-of-state to leave their unruly 14-year-olds in emergency rooms.   This got quite a bit of attention and caused general consternation.

Well now, not surprisingly, it appears that Nebraska will be changing that law.   The new law will cap the age of children who can be left with impunity at three days.   This obviously restores it to its more usual purpose–to protect newborns.

All well and good and really not surprising.   It does take me back to the original question I wrote about.  Why is it okay to leave a three-day-old but not a thirteen-year-old?   The most obvious reasons would seem to be that the newborn really cannot in any way protect himself/herself and that at the same time we can anticipate that the mother of the newborn (and I mean mother, not parent, see the earlier posts) may be really overwhelmed.   There is something that is at once understandable and unsatisfying about this explanation, though.

Gender and Parenting, II

This is to consider the remaining side of my apparent  inconsistency.  You can find the start of this thread here and the consideration of the first side here.    Here’s a (very brief) recap.   I’ve said two things in the past.   1.  Pregnancy is not like anything else and thus, men and women do not stand in the same status vis-a-vis a newborn, even where they are the two people who contributed the DNA to create the newborn.   2.  Parenting is not gendered, by which I mean that if you are thinking about two-parent families, there is nothing particularly magical about one male parent/one female parent families as opposed two female parent families or two male parent families.  It appears (although truly, as I think this through, it seems less and less apparent to me) that these two things are in tension.   This little series of posts seeks to explore that tension.

So the last one dealt with the pregnancy question.   In a nutshell, I think pregnancy is different and so the woman who was pregnant (who is the woman who gives birth) has a unique relationship with the child.   But that’s true no matter who else you are thinking about–whether you are thinking about her husband or her wife or her committed female partner or whoever.   So I come to see that as being less about sex/gender, which already diminishes the tension substantially.

This leads me to turn to the day-to-day life of parenting question and the roles that male and female parents play.   Now of course we call female parents “mothers” and we call male parents “fathers” but are they really all that different?

Gender and Parenting, Continued

This is a continuation of the last post.   You’d be better off starting there.  This is about resolving or explaining the apparent contradiction I highlighted last time.

I’ll start by reasserting my belief that being pregnant has to be taken into account.   To ignore this experience/activity is unacceptable to me.  For now I won’t say more than that, but I can expand on that if need be.   I’ve written a fair bit about surrogacy in the past and, of course, figuring out the status of the surrogate is all about giving meaning to pregnancy.

Not only do I think we have to give credit or count pregnancy, I think it ought to count as a parenting-type activity.   The only hesitation I have here is the whole “when is there actually a child” question, because it isn’t clear to me that one can be a parent until there is a child.   But there is clearly some intimate connection between a pregnant woman and a developing embryo/fetus.   I’m generally think it transcends a physical connection, though I’m not sure this matters.  The type of thing a pregnant woman is doing is the type of thing a parent does for a child.  For this reason, I’m inclined to assert that a woman who gives birth is a mother.    

So What About Gender and Parenting?

The last two posts were both about gender and parenthood, but coming from completely different directions.    Perhaps they even look (or are) inconsistent.    I think it is worth exploring that, at least a bit.

The earlier of the two posts is about mothers and fathers and abandoning children.  I won’t repeat the substance of the post here (you can of course go an read it) but one thing you could take from it is that men and women are not similarly situated with regard to newborns, even where they are both genetically linked to the child.   Men can walk away from newborns way before they are born if they choose to.   There’s no absolute reason why they need to be there when the child is born.   Women, of course, have to be there.

The difference, of course, is rooted in the physical reality of pregnancy.  Women are the ones who are pregnant.  Women are the ones who give birth.   I think that is an ineradicable, undeniable difference between men and women.   (I’ve written a fair bit about this in a variety of contexts.  You can find some of these posts here.)  If we ignore this difference in the name of equality, I think we end up short-changing women by discounting something that is actually very important.

A Small Update on Gendered Parenting

A while back I wrote a post on gendered ideas of parenting, spurred (of all things) by the nomination of Sarah Palin.   I just wanted to touch base on that again briefly.

Last Friday the Connecticut State Supreme Court struck down the state statute restricting marriage to one man/one woman.   In the aftermath, the New York Times featured this article about a heterosexual married couple opposed to same-sex marriage.   As I’ve mentioned, the arguments often rely on religious teaching or begin by noting that a man and a woman can, without outside assistance, create a baby.   By contrast, of course, two men or two women cannot.   But the couple featured here is different.  First, they decline to argue the religion point.   second, they are in fact foster/adoptive parents.  In other words, they do not claim a DNA/genetic link with their children.

The argument they offer in favor of restricting marriage to different sex couples is basically that men and women are essentially different and hence, bring different (and complementary, I assume) things to parenting.   Thus, a child with two fathers has no mother and a child with two mothers has no father and, in either case, this is a significant loss to the child.

There’s several things to say, actually.  First, since nothing prohibits gay men and lesbians from having children in Connecticut, you could think that those children born into those relationship might at least benefit from whatever stabilizing influence marriage has.   (The stabilizing influence argument is pretty standard fare for these cases.)   But beyond that, I think here you can see really clearly the relationship between a view of the genders as dissimilar and complementary and opposition to same-sex marriage/parenting.   Because of arguments about religion and DNA/genetic links, this argument isn’t always so clearly exposed.    I just thought I’d flag this for further discussion later.

Women, Men and Abandoned Children

I’m still thinking about the issues raised by the recent spate of publicity generated by that Nebraska statute.  (I’ve written a bit about this before here and here so you can see what I’m talking about.)  There’s a similar story that’s been in the news around Seattle recently.

This is the flip side of the Nebraska story really–a young woman being prosecuted for having abandoned her baby at the wrong sort of place.   (She left it at a church rather than a fire station or hospital.  Some hours passed before the baby was discovered.)   The mother (who is 22) had given birth alone outside of her apartment complex.  The child is now living with the mother of the 24-year-old Iraq-bound soldier who is identified as the father.

It’s impossible for me to proceed here without commenting on the situation this young woman was in.   Giving birth alone, outside, in the dark is simply unimaginable.   I understand why we make it criminal to abandon a newborn child, but I also shudder at the circumstances that lead this young woman (any women) to leave a child like this.   It can only be the result of a failure of community and perhaps society and punishing a single individual seems almost to obscure that point. (I will observe that the local prosecutor has stated he would not seek jail time, which is at least some sort of reassurance.)