Letters to the Editor
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Rescinding parental rights DOES NOT
fucking mean that you won't owe support or have financial responsibilities in regards to a child, whether you are a sperm donor or not. It only means you have NO legal rights in regards to legal or physical custody or contact with the resultant child. Get it fucking straight. Only a fool donates sperm.
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Finding fools' sperm
only plays into women's desire to breed with stupid guys. They make it easier for their daughters to lord it over the [now stupider] next generation of men.
It is this universal desire for women to find a guy who is not quite as swift as the woman that ultimately leads to such atrocities as male genital mutilation being endorsed by women in the first world while the men put up with women carping about female genital mutilation occurring CONTINENTS AWAY.
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Biological roots
Paternity and maternity as identified by contribution of gametes evolved because, under certain environmental conditions, juveniles whose care was more assured by certain designated adults driven to identify with and care for them had higher survival rates to reproductive age than juveniles whose care was not as assured by such biologically-driven identification and commitment of caretakers. Likewise, under certain evolutionary contexts, survival and selective advantage of progeny has been conferred on individuals who are driven toward other behaviors, like use of aggression and violence to gain resources, siblicide, infanticide, and rape. The fact that natural selection formed traits, or tendencies, over past millennia and ancient environmental contexts carries no normative or adaptive mandates for autonomous humans in contemporary conditions.
Except, of course, by virtue of the stories and fears we carry in our minds. Those stories and fears – about “mothers” and “fathers”, fears of change and of authenticity, fears carried by adults of displeasing mommy and daddy – are what keep us from facing barriers to real parenthood, which is impaired by kinship identification. To the extent that individuals are normatively constructed as caretakers of biologically related children, those children’s development will be impaired precisely because a “parent” thus constructed and granted ownership of offspring is invested (as we consistently observe) less in the growth, self-actualization and autonomy (i.e. well being) of the child as individual than in some idealized and normative model of how “my son” or “my daughter” contributes to the parent’s own attempt to validate self, family name, and social standing as prescribed by pathological social expectations for “success”.
This pathology of kinship, enforced and celebrated by patriarchy as “family”, “motherhood” and “fatherhood”, is the single greatest barrier to the loving and competent care of children and is represented by a culture of “adults” functioning as frightened, dependent children afraid of the disapproval of fictionally constructed “mothers” and “fathers” and afraid of shaming their “families”, rather than as autonomous beings free to choose relationships and to construct themselves.
“Biological roots” and longing for a “biological relationship” (whatever that could conceivably mean) matter to children and create anxiety only because of the maladaptive fictions we perpetuate and ingrain in them, fictions which would not be needed apart from maladaptive drives toward monogamy and identification of a male and female “parent” who somehow have rights to them.
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there is absolutely no evidence for, and a mountain of evidence against
the proposition that there is any substitute for biological relationships UNDER ALL THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH THEY ARE REQUIRED as a "glue" or "facilitator" for all the necessary human relationships and interactions in which they play a role. For some yes, not ALL.
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All Grown Up
I'm an 18 year old young woman who is the biological child of my mother and a sperm donor, of whom I have almost no knowledge. I have been raised by my biological mother and my father--a wonderful human being who has never been anything but totally committed to me. I have never lacked, either emotionally or materially, for anything. My parents raised both my brother (who has a different donor) and I with the knowledge that we were desperately wanted and deeply loved. I learned growing up that family was more than an entaglement of biological committments--it is a tight emotional bond forged through shared experiences and love.
Despite this, I have wanted for several years now to know the identity of my sperm donor. I have yet to begin a meaningful search for my biological father and any biological siblings I might have, out of fear for the message it will send to the man I consider my father in the true sense of the word.
I have both rational reasons (I was recently diagnosed with a chronic disease that often runs in my families) and less rational ones--I just want to know who I look like to grasp at a straw that might, I hope, reveal something about who I am.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but someone needs to remember that those embryoes will one day become young adults with desires and needs of their own, who just may seek to learn about their own pasts.
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clinic sperm donors do not have financial responsibilities
Ben Dover said: "Rescinding parental rights DOES NOT fucking mean that you won't owe support or have financial responsibilities in regards to a child, whether you are a sperm donor or not."
This is simply not true. Most jurisdictions, including all US states exempt sperm bank donors from financial responsibilities. 34 US states have also signed up to the Uniform Parentage Act which exempts private sperm donors under some circumstances.
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I love it! Motherhood and Fatherhood are social constructs! This sort of logic leads to cults and global warming denial, and holocaust denial
This pathology of kinship, enforced and celebrated by patriarchy as “family”, “motherhood” and “fatherhood”, is the single greatest barrier to the loving and competent care of children and is represented by a culture of “adults” functioning as frightened, dependent children afraid of the disapproval of fictionally constructed “mothers” and “fathers” and afraid of shaming their “families”, rather than as autonomous beings free to choose relationships and to construct themselves.
This is the bullshit that is *modern* feminism.
The kind of bullshit that can say that biological facts are mere social constructs to be overcome is the same sort of bullshit that can deny science, deny global warming, deny the humanity of other peoples, and leads directly to cult worship and personality worship.
It's all malleable. It's all social constructs.
You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.
Pathology of kinship?
I look forward to when we can all become batteries in the matrix world.