Reproduction and Responsibility, Growing Further Apart

News Item No.1: Baby-faced Alfie Pattern has fathered a baby at the tender age of 13 together with his gal pal Chantelle Steadman.

News Item No. 2: Nadya Suleman, mother of six children, has just made history by giving birth to only the second set of live octuplets in the world. All her 14 children were conceived using the IVF (in vitro fertilization) method with sperm from the same anonymous donor.

News Item No 3: Ethical concerns are being voiced over women using their dead husbands’ stored sperm to conceive children through assisted reproductive techniques. The procedure is being allowed as long as there is written permission from the husband, but a hue and cry is being made if there is no record of prior consent because the protestors feel that the act of reproduction must be carried out “in a responsible manner”.

Now correct me if I’m wrong here, but is there any part of News Item 1 or News Item 2 that could be in any remote way termed responsible? Alfie Pattern was only 12 when he had sex with his friend; the two children were allowed to sleep on the same bed by their mothers who were friends. Now is that how we define responsibility in our country, allowing pre-teens to share a bed just when they’re reaching adolescence and discovering the changes their bodies and minds are going through? And how responsible is the decision to go ahead and give birth to the baby, even though the mother is only 15 and still in school and the neither parent has any possible way to provide for the child?

The Suleman case is just as weird – why would a woman who is single, who already has six children, and who depends on her parents to support her kids, go in for another expensive IVF procedure? And why on earth would she willingly give birth to eight more children when she has no financial way to take care of them? Yeah, I guess this is what we call responsible behavior – not the decision of a widow to have a baby using her dead husband’s sperm when he hasn’t explicitly given her permission to do so.

It’s such an irony that we’re allowed to walk into fertility clinics, choose an anonymous sperm donor, and have as many children as we want. But when the sperm in question belongs to a dead husband, a person who would have been the actual father of the child we want to conceive if fate hadn’t willed otherwise, the protests of the “ethical and moral” lobbyists are heard loud and clear.

Nadya Suleman and Alfie Pattern are now the cynosure of all eyes; and yes, they will definitely make money out of all this public exposure, negative though it may be. But it’s the other women who are truly harassed, the ones who want a baby with their legal spouses, but are unable to do so because they are dead. And to make matters worse, they have to run from pillar to post, from court to court, to seek legal relief in this matter. Yeah well, that’s your reward for being “responsible parents”, I guess – all the limelight and the hoopla of a three-ring circus!

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