Both Newsweek and The Nation have both posted articles about the “Quiverfull” movement - the extremist anti-birth-control movement among right-wing Protestants. (The title of this post is a quote from a leader of the movement, quoted in the Newsweek article). Here are some excerpts from the articles. First, from Newsweek:

Beyond such purists, the anti-birth control message appears to be gaining ground among some evangelicals. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has become one of its most prominent advocates. “If a couple sees children as an imposition, as something to be vaccinated against, like an illness, that betrays a deeply erroneous understanding of marriage and children,” says Mohler. “Children should be seen as good by default.” His stance isn’t as extreme as that of quiverfull followers; for instance, he condones the use of condoms for married couples in extreme circumstances, like illness. Still, Mohler’s views are considered “an oddity” in mainstream Baptist circles, according to Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land admits, however, that Mohler has certainly expanded his following. “He is seen as the popularizer of a position that is still very marginal, but 15 years ago, it wouldn’t have even been discussed,” says Land, adding that he knows of at least two former students who had reverse vasectomies after hearing Mohler’s arguments. […]

Stephanie Coontz, director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families, says she has increasingly noticed articles on the subject in the Christian press. Part of the reason, she argues, is that conservatives are reacting to revolutionary changes in women’s social roles and seeking to re-impose a more traditional order. “The rhetoric is getting more shrill because people are getting more desperate,” she says. “It’s a backlash that I don’t feel will triumph. In the past, large families were helpful economically, but today, they become a disadvantage, especially to younger kids who don’t get as many resources.”

Coontz has it right; what’s at issue here isn’t just how many children to have, but the sex roles for men and women. Men on top, ruling the household; women below, raising the kids. Lots and lots and lots of kids. From the Nation article:

Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship–”Father knows best”–and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess’s 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the “Great Physician” and sole “Birth Controller,” opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women’s attempts to control their own bodies–the Lord’s temple–are a seizure of divine power.

Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands. Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception–adherents consider all birth control, even natural family planning (the rhythm method), to be the province of prostitutes–and the growing belief among evangelicals that the decision of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s to approve contraception for married couples led directly to the sexual revolution and then Roe v. Wade.

“Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice,” write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement’s founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, “My body is not my own.” This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.

Although the Quiverfull movement is an extreme, it’s my impression that an anti-birth-control movement has been rising among American evangelicals. Having sex without women risking pregnancy is seen as abdicating the role women have been assigned by God.

You know what the scariest sentence in the Newsweek article is? “His stance isn’t as extreme as that of quiverfull followers; for instance, he condones the use of condoms for married couples in extreme circumstances, like illness.” Yes, that’s what makes someone a moderate on birth control: Condoms are okay if the mom is too deathly ill to risk pregnancy.

Note also the final page of the Nation article, in which DLC¹ paid researcher Kenneth Longman is quoted recommending that Democrats should bid for these voters by urging a return to patriarchy (and giving up on abortion rights). Unsurprising, but still annoying as hell.

1. DLC stands for Democratic Leadership Council, an extremely influential Democratic Party organ. (back)

Should supply and demand determine the cost of adoption? Tariq sent me this article about a campaign by Rev. Ken Hutcherson in Washington state. Hutcherson is taking on the adoption industry. Here’s a quote:

When a couple seeking to adopt a white baby is charged $35,000 and a couple seeking a black baby is charged $4,000, the image that comes to the Rev. Ken Hutcherson’s mind is of a practice that was outlawed in America nearly 150 years ago — the buying and selling of human beings.

The practice, which is widespread among private adoption facilitators, of charging prospective parents different fees depending on the race or ethnicity of the child they adopt is one that Hutcherson is fighting to change from his Redmond, Wash., church. The Antioch Bible Church has established its own adoption agency, and is lobbying state legislators to change Washington’s laws.

I don’t have time to write about this in detail, but this article outlines some of my concerns about the adoption industry and American’s views on children in general. Read the article, and tell me what you think.

I think this graph, from an upcoming paper in The Journal of Economic Perspectives¹, is interesting.

There’s a “sky is falling” mentality among many so-called marriage advocates. According to their storyline, marriage in America had a golden past until the culturally permissive 60s and 70s, during which drug addicted and probably communistic social scientists convinced legislators to pass no-fault divorce laws, after which divorce rates shot up as parents abandoned their tow-headed big-eyed children to go inhale the demon weed with Abbie Hoffman while having loose and quite possibly lesbian sex with Janis Joplin on top of a LSD-themed painted car while hairy-legged feminists kick men out of the home creating the fatherlessness crisis which has led to the trifecta of evil: skyrocketing divorce rates, Janet Jackson’s nipple ring, hip-hop music.

I never hear any of the divorce chicken littles talk about divorce in non-apocalyptic terms; in their narrative, things are always getting worse. But it’s not the sky that’s been falling since the 1970s - it’s the divorce rate. And to blame divorce on gay marriage - when divorce has been dropping like George Bush’s approval ratings for as long as same-sex marriage has been on the national agenda - is lunacy. On the other hand, marriage rates have been falling.

The dotted lines on the graph show where the century-old divorce trend would have been if not for the recent rise and fall. The question is, will divorce rates return to their long-established slow rise, or will the current fall in divorce rates continue?²

More on divorce in future posts - including a post on that most unjustly framed institution, no-fault divorce. No-fault didn’t cause rising divorce rates in the 60s and 70s; if anything, it was the other way around. Plus, the rise of one great American institution and the fall of another: birth control and shotgun marriages. Woot!

1. ”Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces,” by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007. Pdf link to paper. (back)
2. Or it could always level out, I guess, or do any number of inbetween choices. (back)

Alas readers who saw Whale Rider might remember Keisha Castle Hughes, she was the young Maori actress who was nominated for a best Actress Oscar for her role as Paikea. It has just been announced that she is pregnant at 16. Span and Cactus Kate (of all people), have already covered some of the ways the coverage of these facts has been extremely offensive. But I want to look at this discourse in a little more detail, because it is pissing me off. From the NZ Herald:

National MP Paula Bennett, a mother at 17, said whichever way you looked at the situation, 16 was far too young to have a baby.

She believed there was no way a 16-year-old had the maturity to cope with the demands of raising a baby.

and from The Dominion Post

Family Planning executive director Jackie Edmond said New Zealand had the third-highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world. She hoped other teens would not want to “copy” the actress.

This level of tsk-tsking has a very clear subtext about young Maori girls who get pregnant. It’s part of a concerted strategy to blame poor people for being poor.

Look I’m a middle-class white girl, I find the idea of having a baby before I’m economically and socially secure terrifying, but I get to think that one day I will be economically and socially secure. Not everyone grows up with those set of assumptions about their life, and if you don’t have those assumptions your feelings about pregnancy and motherhoood are going to be qutie different.

But there’s actually a bigger issue here. Anika Moa has a song on her new album about the abortion she had when her music career was taking off, that she now regrets. She was told from all sides that if she continued the pregnancy she wouldn’t be able to have a music career - that she had to choose.

That’s why I hate the rhetoric of ‘choice’. Women shouldn’t have to choose between being a musician and a mother. Obviously in the months immediately after you give birth you do have physical restrictions on what you are going to do (longer the longer you breast feed). But so? Why does that mean that you can’t make music - and if you make music people want to listen to, why can’t they get to listen to it?

The answer is, of course, ‘capitalism’. I get that - most women do have to make that choice. But the way most people talk about it you’d think these choices forced on us by something people have no control over, rather than our economic system. You’d think that there was some law laid down that once you had a child you couldn’t do anything else, or if you did it would be 100 times harder. The reason that having a child at 16 is so very hard is that having a child is seen as an individualised project. Parenting gets no economic resouces and no support. It’s hard enough to do with a reasonable amount of money - if you don’t have a reasonable amount of money being able to do anything but parent when you have a child is really difficult.

We could organise our world so that parenting wasn’t just supported, but treated as the necessary work that it is. If we did that, if parents didn’t have to work huge amounts of outside hours (or live on the DPB, and all the poverty that that implies), then parenting wouldn’t be the end or your life. Women who were mothers, whether at 16 or 40, could do other things as well, parenting wouldn’t be seen as the end of your life, and your chance to develop.*

Maybe if we lived in a non-capitalist world that valued parenting women would have children young - when they had lots of energy. Maybe women would have them late, because they wanted to grow up first. Maybe women would make a wide variety decisions based from what they want from life.

But until we build that new world I wish people would just stop judging young women.

Note for commenters: This is not the place for a discussion about Keisha Castle-Hughes or her pregnancy - please keep the discussion general rather than specific, or on the discourse rather than the event.

Also published on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, Robin Wilson writes:

What accounts for the new resistance to no-fault? Reasons include the growing evidence that divorce often hurts children, feminists’ renewed recognition of the importance of legal protection for mothers raising children, and concerns about the economic disparities created by differences in marriage rates. Gay marriage advocates have also played a role in this shift, by calling attention to “easy divorce,” which they say is the real threat to marriage, not same-sex unions.

Isn’t there a far more important group that Professor Wilson has forgotten to mention? It’s as if she hasn’t noticed that right-wing Christians, not feminists or same-sex marriage advocates, are the people running the government nowadays. Opposing divorce is a Christian right priority, not a feminist or a queer rights priority.

Lindsay at Majikthise, like me, is skeptical of the idea that feminism and gay rights “accounts for the new resistance to no-fault.” But she says she finds this argument of Professor Wilson’s more persuasive:

While I was living in Maryland, my husband, from whom I am now divorced, assaulted me (an assault for which he has since been convicted). On the whole, I had been impressed by how Maryland protects victims of domestic violence. But I also came to understand why the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women has opposed Judge Kaye’s unilateral divorce proposals.

When no-fault divorce advocates say that family law should pay no attention to the reasons why a marriage ends, what does this mean in practice for modern women like me who have careers and have built assets? We are told that we should in effect have to pay our batterers for the privilege of divorcing them. That seems to me, as to many other Americans, not only bad social policy, but deeply and profoundly wrong.

No law will ever be perfect for all abused women; but the harm to Professor Wilson, which is that her abuser got more money in their divorce than he would have in a fault system, is real but also relatively minor. Before we oppose no-fault divorce, we should also ask what opposing no-fault would mean for abused women who don’t have the economic or legal resources of a law professor, and who aren’t able to prove abuse in court. A “fault” law with teeth — for instance, a law that mandates a one-year delay before divorce can be granted, unless abuse is proved in a courtroom — would effectively of tie victims to their abusers, drawing out the process of separation for an extra year.

Furthermore, for many abused women, no-fault divorce seems to improve their “bargaining position” within a bad marriage. One study¹, published early this year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics² (pdf link), found that when states switched to no-fault divorce, there were substantial benefits for some women:

…Easy access to divorce redistributes marital power from the party interested in preserving the marriage to the partner who wants out. In most instances, this resulted in an increase in marital power for women, and a decrease in power for men.

Our analysis of US data revealed the legislative change [to no-fault divorce] had caused female suicide to decline by about a fifth, domestic violence to decline by about a third, and intimate femicide - the husband’s murder of his wife - to decline by about a tenth.

I can support attempts to reduce divorce rates by providing positive help to stay married (free marriage counseling, for example), although I’m skeptical about how effective such programs will be. But we should all be against attempts to reduce marriage divorce by disempowering people who want to leave marriage — proposals that, in effect, use the law to force people to remain married against their will. These laws will harm battered women most of all; having to prove abuse in court in order to be free of their abusers is a horribly unfair burden to place on victims of abuse. With all due respect, I’d ask both Lindsay and Professor Wilson to rethink their positions.

Hat tip: Feminist Law Professors.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

1. Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(1) February 2006 (back)
2. I posted more about these findings here. (back)

Amanda at Pandagon linked to my critique of the methodology used by anti-divorce researcher Elizabeth Marquardt. In comments, Pandagon reader “Bitter Scribe” wrote (emphasis added by me):

…The divorce rate was kept down through the mid-20th century by virtue of an oppressive patriarchy. Restrictive social mores and economic dependence kept countless women bound in bad marriages.

When those mores changed and economic opportunities for women grew, so did the divorce rate, for the simple reason that the bonds to bad marriages loosened or dissolved. In other words, people who decry the current divorce rate are missing the point; it is today at (or close to) its natural level. The lower divorce rates of the much-romanticized bygone years got that way because they were artifically depressed.

All this is by way of agreeing with Ms Kate: Divorce is not just necessary, it is inevitable. Allowing people never to make a mistake in choosing a life partner is an intolerably cruel restriction that a free society will never, should never, accept.

As for the children of divorce, they deserve the same sympathy as any other victims of an inevitable social-historical shift. We can take hope in the fact that the natural resilience of the young, combined with the love and best intentions of two parents who may no longer love each other, will succeed in giving the child of divorce a chance at a fulfilled life without robbing his parents of theirs.

In the post about the dangers of baby blogging, I alluded to a child protection conference that had thrown up several essay-worthy subjects, then lapsed back into silence. Now, over a month later, I’m finally organised enough to tackle some of those subjects.

The child allegedly being protected by the conference was, in case there was any doubt, my daughter. By all measures health professionals have devised, she’s thriving, but I’ve struggled to cope with single parenting on top of my long-standing depression and my rocky financial situation. There are days when I feel overwhelmed with guilt and say that my daughter would be better off in someone else’s care, or even that my fragile mental state will do some concrete harm to her; these comments have been interpreted by people with responsibility for child protection as evidence that my daughter is in danger.

At first, I was happy for social services to be involved. I knew I was coping badly on my own, and I thought they could help me cope better, especially as everyone I spoke to insisted they only wanted to give me the support I needed to look after my daughter on my own. But as they called meeting after meeting and produced reams of paperwork, that objective seemed to get lost in the noise.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago I read a story from Rueters about a couple from Maine, who kidnapped their 19 year old daughter. They forced her into a car, and tried taking her to New York so they could force her to have an abortion. The daughter escaped and called police while she hid in a store in New Hampshire. The parents have been arrested and held on $100,000 bail. After reading the first couple paragraphs of the story, my immediate reaction was, “I wonder if the potential father is black.” However, the initial article reveals very little about the motive. After my initial read, the only motive I could glean was that the parents were mad that the boyfriend was in jail. But, this story didn’t add up to me. So yesterday, one of my students mentioned the story and said that–the kidnapped woman’s boyfriend is a black man, and the daughter told police that racism was a motive in the kidnapping.

Based on my research on interracial relationships, this story actually fits fairly well into the narratives I have seen in many white families where relatives strongly object to interracial relationships. The only thing that surprises me about the story is that the parents attempted to kidnap this woman; the cases I know of personally generally involve less direct coercion. I know of 2 cases (one in my research and one in another sociological study) where parents of a white person in an interracial relationship suggested, encouraged, and promoted abortion to prevent the birth of a biracial child (I am hesitantly using the term biracial because most of the white relatives would say the child is black.). I also know of other cases where people encouraged white mother’s to place a child for adoption because the child’s father was black, and I know of many situations where white families offered bribes and/or withdrew emotional and/or financial support as a way to discourage an interracial relationship or a pregnancy that resulted from such a relationship. In these cases, white relatives feel they are protecting the family’s reputation, and/or they feel that the relative in the interracial relationship is too naive (especially women) to know what she/he is getting into. White relatives who feel this way believe that birth of a biracial child is a permanent marker of an interracial relationship that will hurt their relative’s social standing (white privilege), and to some extent, I’m sure they are right about this. The irony of this is that many white relatives of interracial couples would be the first to say that race doesn’t matter or that whites do not have unearned privileges, but suddenly when it hits close to home, they change their tune.

The media attention given to this kidnapping has been varied, ranging from the first story, which was completely raceless, to the subsequent story where race is revealed as a motive. This story also has implications for abortion politics, and thus, it has received attention from those for and against abortion rights. I thought a nice sampling of headlines for this story would reveal a lot about our racial politics, our abortion politics, and where location where race and abortion politics intersect (or don’t intersect in public life).

• We’ll start with this headline from BET.com–”Parents Were Upset Baby’s Father Was Black, Police Say.” Note how this headline focuses on the father’s race as the point of contention for the parents. I also found it interesting that the author uses the term “unborn child.” I know this phrase is passe among many pro-choice advocates, but I can clearly understand why an African American writer would choose to emphasize personhood, given the long history African peoples being treated as less than human. I tried to walk the tightrope between my pro-choice and pro-black views by using this phrase, “to prevent the birth of a biracial child.”
• This headline from Seascoastonline.com comes from the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Herald–”A call for calm in kidnapping probe.” The article is from AP, but even if an article comes from AP, local papers make up their own headlines. What is so ridiculous about this headline is that the article has nothing whatsoever to do with “a call for calm.” I don’t know if the person who wrote this headline was worried that the 10 Black people who live in NH were going to go out and protest this, but the headline certainly does not match the story (Ok, I know the number of Black folks in NH is more than 10, but please allow me a sarcastic moment.). The actual article makes NO mention of the racial aspects of the case, which I don’t necessarily object to. However, I frequently see articles “calling for calm” any time an event is racially charged. Now here is a better headline for the same AP release–”Prosecutors mum on kidnapping charge.” Yes, the headline avoids the race issue, but at least it matches the subject. I would expect a prosecutor not to divulge too much information in a high profile case, to try to preserve the jury pool. But how can the same article have such dramatically different headlines.
• Next comes this headline from Truth Dig.com, a progressive website that seems to cater to a white audience–”Taking the ‘Choice’ Out of ProChoice.” The article makes several good points about reframing pro-choice politics, and remains nearly silent on the racism issue until we get to this lovely quote:

  “The back story, as assembled by police and reporters, has all the elements of soap opera even in its bare bones. Katelyn, a high school honors student who enrolled in Boston College, had been sent to George Washington University in an attempt by her parents to distance her from her boyfriend. The debacle followed her parents’ discovery that she was back in Maine and pregnant. Katelyn has told authorities that her parents were outraged because her boyfriend is black. Their attitude may have been more shaped by the fact that he is in jail, again. But there is nothing that justifies duct tape or the destination.”

  Well, Ellen Goodman needs to read the other reports because this young woman has explicitly stated to police that her parents were upset about the race of her boyfriend, not his criminal record. She seems to take it upon herself to down play the race issue and provide a pseudo-justification for the parents (He’s a jailbird.). What’s sad about this headline, is that it is the same problem we have over and over again in the white progressive/liberal/feminist blogosphere. Some white progressive/liberal/feminist takes it upon her/himself to very carefully outline a progressive/liberal/feminist perspective on a hot button issue (in this case abortion), while simultaneously marginalizing racism and the perspectives of people of color. She makes a good point that this case in no way undermines pro-choice politics, and the family would have an extremely difficult time finding a doctor to perform an abortion on an unwilling woman. Unfortunately, Goodman doesn’t realize (or care about??) the clear racial implications of the case.

• Now here’s another pathetic take on this story. This time we have the anti-abortion website Lifesite with–”New Website Details Thousands of Violent Crimes by Abortion Supporters.” The authors are promoting a new site that basically argues that pro-choice advocates are a bunch of criminals, and the site attempts to use this case to demonstrate the “violent nature of abortion.” While the article briefly mentions race; the author also decides that abortion is violent and the parents were violent not because of their racism but because in the words of one anti-abortion activist, “Abortion is one of the most violent acts known in the history of mankind and its acceptance into our otherwise civil society has served to breed more and more violence to the point where we are now witnessing parents who physically subdue and kidnap their own children in an effort to force them to abort their unborn grandchildren.” Does this guy really think the parents would have wanted this woman to have an abortion if the guy was white? Isn’t racism the underlying cause of this violent act. These crazy parents don’t epitomize pro-choice advocates. First, how can anybody even remotely think that kidnapping somebody and trying to force that same person to have an abortion is in anyways consistent with pro-choice politics. Clearly these parents were anti-choice because they didn’t want to let their daughter have any say in this matter.

A case like this can be framed and used to promote multiple viewpoints, as the headlines reveal. Unfortunately, the vast majority of media outlets, pushed the racist elements of this story to the back of the agenda. In particular, people seem to be attracted to the abortion angle of the story, not the racist angle. If you miss the racist, angle of this story than you miss a huge piece of the puzzle.

In my last post on transracial adoption (TRA), I discussed how popular media outlets cover transracial adoption. I argued that the current framing sets up several false dichotomies that further racism and white supremacy. In the process, I ruffled a few feathers. I noticed several of the commenters (especially on Alas) were offended that I challenged the way that media outlets cover TRA. In this post, I suppose I’ll ruffle a few more feathers because this time I will speak more directly about transracial and interracial families (through adoption, marriage, cohabitation, procreate, etc.), not so much the media framing of transracial/interracial families but rather what the increase in transracial/interracial families does and does not tell us about social change.

I would like to start by clarifying my personal position on TRA and interracial families more broadly. I do not oppose transracial (TR) or interracial (IR) families/relationships. I think from a sociological perspective TR and IR families are neither good nor bad. I suppose some people may be surprised that I do not label TR/IR families as “good” given the general posts I have put up on interracial relationships. Ideally, what I would like to see is a point where TR/IR families are viewed as unremarkable and normal—a point that we are a long way away from. The current liberal discourse sets up TR/IR families as “celebrations of diversity” or the “promise of the future,” but this is problematic for several reasons.

First, off both TR and IR families can be and often are both agents of change and promoters of the status quo. Our families can reiterate racism or challenge it. In fact, there are whole societies in Latin American where interracial families are common place, but racism is still firmly entrenched. A quick glance of the elite’s in Latin America reveal that those who are whiter and lighter hold the highest positions and the most power. I think the increasing number of TR/IR families here in the US does signify a change in our racial ideology, but it does not signify the coming end of racism. In my own research on heterosexual IR couples, I found many people who were in interracial relationships and were more than willing to reiterate racist sentiments—i.e. black men are good in bed, black women are bitchy, biracial children are messed up.

My second concern is consistent with the views expressed over at Mixed Media Watch. Jen and Carmen have argued on more than one occasion that viewing multiracial people as the hope of an anti-racist future puts a great deal of added pressure on mixed race people. I think this is true more broadly for TR/IR families. While we may feel an extra burden to fight racism because our families are marginalized, the burden to fight racism really needs to be spread throughout the society as a whole (not just people of color and TR/IR families). Seriously, who made TR/IR families racial experts? Many of us are no more educated about race than the average American; we may have valuable experiences to share and some of us certain do grapple more with the politics of racism, but this should not be assumed.

My third concern is that an increasing number of TR/IR families see their experiences as somehow unrelated to those of people of color more broadly. The people who believe this way believe that they are facing discrimination primarily because their families are TR/IR, not because the long history of white racism in this country has promoted the notion of distinct biological races. While I don’t expect everybody in TR/IR relationships to take up the mantle of anti-racism, I do find it particularly offensive when people in TR/IR families support racist causes or engage in behavior that is generally degrading to people of color. I personally know transracial adoptees whose white parents have made degrading or racist comments or whose parents didn’t know quite what to tell them about why people at school were calling them names. I know of biracial people whose parents have explicitly directed them not to marry into a particular racial group. When TR/IR families engage in this sort of behavior, they set racial progress back.

TR/IR families are frequently under the microscope, and our lives and decisions are often scrutinized by everyone. For many of us this leads to a constant desire to prove that we are normal, that we are not racist, that we love everyone, that we haven’t sold out our own group, that our children won’t be messed up, or that we can handle anything that comes our way. Because we are constantly scrutinized, many of us get tired and defensive. Even though it is hard to do, I think it is important to understand that critiquing racism is not the same as critiquing TR/IR families. So when I say we need to stop viewing TRA as blacks vs. whites and the media needs to stop perpetuating this, I’m not saying TRA is wrong and IR families are bad or anti-black (incidentally some are and some aren’t). These criticisms are directed at the structure of our social institutions not individual TR/IR families. They are commentaries on society as a whole and how racism affects the lives of people. Sometimes we (TR/IR families) spend an inordinate amount of time trying to prove just how normal/mainstream we are. In my own research I heard many people say, we are normal; we are just like everybody else. My sense is that when it comes to TR/IR families we are like all others, some others, and no others all at the same time.

It’s certainly great that TR/IR families now have the right to exist and be recognized, and unfortunately, our society is generally not accepting of our relationships. I suppose this is part of the reason most of my posts are very light on identifying common problems in IR relationships. Most of the time I focus on the problems created by people outside of the TR/IR relationship; however, TR/IR families exist in that outside world, too. We are not above critique–individually or collectively, and in reality we will know we are making progress when we can look at our relationships without having to be defensive. I know we are not there yet, but I would like to push people in that direction.

I worry when we hold ourselves up as the ultimate symbol of progress, when we become overly exuberant and, on rare occasions, go so far as to say our families are better. TR/IR families are not the bellwethers that signal the end of racism. Do they signal a change in our racial ideology? Yes, but we cannot make assumptions about what that change will be and whether or not it will be for the better or the worse. I know that may seem pessimistic to some, but we do have examples in Latin America that show us that interracial families and multiracial people will not lead to the end of racism. TR/IR families shouldn’t be blamed for that any more than anyone else.

(Side Note: I think I could have written a very similar article about same gender families and relationships. I think the idea that same gender relationships inherently challenge sexism is false for some of the same reasons mentioned above.)

I also wanted to add several links to posts on transracial adoptions and interracial relationships.

Republic of T on adopting a black child

Transracial Abductees
a site written by a woman who was adopted by white parents and opposes many aspects of TRA

Harlow Monkey
discussions some of the dynamics of interracial families

Daddy, Papa, and Me
numerous posts on being a transracial adoptive parent

This Woman’s Work
another site run by a parent of a transracially adopted child

Ghetto Gold Naro% has you tube links to stories about TRA (they sooo back up my previous post)

Here’s My Post at Alas It’s worth it to read the comments because they were very different than those on my site.

Every so often, friends or family members tell me about opportunities for freelance work. Some of the suggestions - the ones that could help me build a writing career - would appeal even if I was childless and working full-time. Others - training to be a translator or proofreader, for instance - probably wouldn’t. But they’re not supposed to: their biggest selling point is that I can work from home while caring for my daughter.

Before I was a parent, it sounded like such a good idea. Rather than having to choose between going out to work and staying at home with my hypothetical child, I could combine both. No need to wonder whether my baby was safe and contented - a glance across the room could put my mind at rest. No need to worry that I was financially dependant on someone else - I would have the security of my own income source.

What I didn’t realise - what I had to learn from firsthand experience - was how intensive the job of looking after a small child is. In my vision of parenthood, the work consisted mainly of physical chores such as washing clothes and preparing meals; in practice the physical work is the easiest part. In addition to the chores, taking care of a child requires a level of concentration that doesn’t sit well with an attempt to build a freelance career.

While my daughter’s awake, she wants my attention. If she doesn’t have it, she quickly realises this and makes sure she regains it by letting out a cry that’s virtually impossible to ignore. For short spells, if I’m doing something I don’t need to think deeply about, I can block out the cries; shutting them out effectively enough to finish an essay is beyond me. And even if, by some miracle, she’s too absorbed in her play to miss my attention, I know she could wriggle into difficulties at any moment. Watching her out of the corner of one eye, constantly alert for the early warning signs that she’s about to need my help, pretty much prevents me concentrating on whatever it was I wanted to write.

That only leaves the times when my daughter’s asleep to work on my freelance projects. And here the problem boils down into one that’s familiar to any woman who does paid work: the second shift. Whether I work on freelance projects or not, I need to spend a certain amount of time on my daughter and associated chores. Trying to add freelance work to the mix means effectively trying to do two jobs at the same time - with exhaustion the predictable result.

But although this arrangement has the same disadvantages the working mother suffers, it doesn’t offer the corresponding advantages. My freelance projects will be speculative, at least initially, so the dream of financial independance remains just that. And, by not going out to work, I’m isolating myself with no colleagues and no potential change of scene. It seems I’ve combined the worst of working with the worst of staying at home.

I’ve heard some people make a success of freelancing with children. I don’t know whether they have money in the bank, contracts in hand, or just a partner willing to subsidise them until their projects get off the ground, but it seems they have something I’m missing. For me, working from home is all problems and no solutions. I’m thinking of training as a teacher instead.

Last year, on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360″ show¹, Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds - which is being re-released in a trade paperback edition this month - had this exchange with Cooper:

Anderson Cooper: Elizabeth, one of the questions that you asked the participants is whether or not they would describe their family as stressful. Fifty-one percent of children of — of what might be termed good divorces agreed with that statement, as compared to only 35 percent of those in unhappy marriages. What do you make of that?

Elizabeth Marquardt: That’s right. One of the striking findings to come out of our study was that children of good divorces often fare worse than those from unhappy marriages, so long as the marriage is low-conflict. And most marriages that end in divorce now are low-conflict.

This is fairly typical of how the Between Two Worlds study was reported - compared to the control group (young adults raised in intact marriages), young adults whose parents divorced fare worse. Elizabeth relies on this comparison often; in the Anderson Cooper interview, she criticizes The Good Divorce author Constance Ahrons’ research for having no control group of nondivorced parents.

Here’s another example, from a New York Times article about the Between Two Worlds study:²

The new survey, based on the first nationally representative sample of young adults, highlights the many ways that divorce shapes the emotional tenor of childhood.

For example, those who grew up in divorced families were far more likely than those with married parents to say that they felt like a different person with each parent, that they sometimes felt like outsiders in their own home and that they had been alone a lot as a child.

Those with married parents, however, were far more likely to say that children were at the center of their family and that they generally felt emotionally safe.

Unfortunately, the methodology of the Between Two Worlds study is fatally flawed, and the research cannot support any of these comparisons. Why? Because respondents were asked different questions depending on if their parents had divorced or not.

For instance, take the finding, reported in the Times, that adults raised by married parents were far more likely to sat “that they generally felt emotionally safe” when they were growing up. This finding is also reported in Between Two Worlds (page 59):

In our national survey, most young adults from intact families strongly agree that when they were grouping up, “I generally felt emotionally safe.” But fewer than half of those from divorced families say the same thing. Young people who grew up in “bad divorces” are less likely to say they felt emotionally safe, but I was surprised to find that even those of us from “good divorces” felt significantly less safe than our peers from intact families with unhappy but low-conflict marriages.”

This finding is based on asking young adults whose parents stayed married to agree or disagree with the statement “I generally felt emotionally safe.” In contrast, those whose parents divorced were instead asked “After my parents’ divorce, I generally felt emotionally safe.”³

So the respondents in the control group were asked about their childhood in general. In contrast, the respondents from divorced families were asked to focus specifically on a major family trauma. Given the biased questioning, it would have been a miracle if Elizabeth didn’t find major differences between the two groups. But it doesn’t tell us anything about outcomes, or about long-range trauma. The study design cannot distinguish between those who were unhappy for a while in the post-divorce period, but who on the whole recovered; and those who were left with long-term, ongoing trauma due to their parents’ divorce.

In the Times article, Robert Emory (of the University of Virginia’s “Center for Children, Families and the Law”) said ”The key is to separate pain from pathology.” This is the distinction that the Between Two Worlds study failed to make.

To see why this matters, imagine doing a similar study, this time dividing respondents into those who had pets who died, and those who didn’t. If you asked the “no pet” group if they felt emotionally safe as kids, but asked the “pet died” group if they felt emotionally safe after their pet’s death, probably many more of the latter group would say they didn’t feel emotionally safe. But would that tell us anything about the long-range outcomes for these two groups? Would a direct comparison of the two groups, as if they had been asked the same question, be appropriate? Of course not. A question about a particular, traumatic period in childhood cannot be used to characterize a respondent’s upbringing on the whole.

According to Elizabeth Marquardt, the respondents from divorced families were “periodically” reminded to focus on the period after their parents’ divorce throughout the survey. This means that almost none of the comparisons between divorced and non-divorced families in Between Two Worlds have any validity. For instance, the finding that Anderson Cooper focused on, that those from divorced families are more likely to “describe their family as stressful,” seems unremarkable when you keep in mind that the respondents were asked only about stress “after my parents divorce.” What child wouldn’t find that time stressful? But it doesn’t prove that their upbringing was more stressfel as a whole.

Even results from questions that didn’t include a “after my parents’ divorce” provision are dubious, in my eyes, because the context of the survey as a whole is changed by constantly asking those with divorced parents - and only those with divorced parents - to focus on a painful memory. The poor methodology taints the entire survey.

One finding from Between Two Worlds that Elizabeth emphasized is that “grown children from unhappy, low-conflict marriages generally fare better than those from ‘good’ divorces.” I doubt this finding would have been as strong — or existed at all — if this survey had asked the control group the same questions. Even the current, flawed results show some cases in which those raised by “good divorce” parents appear to be better off than those who parents stayed together. For instance, contrary to the New York Times’ reporting, those raised in “good divorce” families were slightly less likely to feel “like an outsider in my home,” than those whose parents stuck with unhappy marriages.

How much “extra” unhappiness, doubt and misery did Between Two Worlds measure by asking those with divorced parents, over and over, to think of “after my parents divorce?” There’s no way of knowing, but it could have been a large effect. Even a small effect could have seriously changed the finding that “grown children from unhappy, low-conflict marriages generally fare better than those from ‘good’ divorces,” because in many cases the statistical difference between those two groups was fairly small.

When I asked her about the difference in questions on her blog, Elizabeth responded:

Since we were studying post-divorce childhood, we asked those from divorced families to answer the question in regard to “after your parents’ divorce” and reminded them of that periodically through the interview. …If you want to study post-divorce childhood you have to ask people about, well, post-divorce childhood.

I thought they were studying the long-term effects of divorce. If it’s true that a person whose parents divorced when they were a child is significantly more likely to recall their upbringing as emotionally unsafe, stressful, etc., then that effect should show up without loading the question by asking subjects to focus specifically on the divorce.

If Elizabeth fears that subjects whose parents divorced when they were older - say, 10 or 15 - would have put too much weight on their pre-divorce time, then she should have asked her questions bounded by period (”When you were between 10 and 15 years old….” and so on). Then all respondents could have been asked the same questions, and the results examined for differences pre- and post- divorce. Failing to ask the control group the same questions is not a small design flaw; it’s a catastrophic error that invalidates all results based on comparisons to the control group.⁴

Between Two Worlds proves that many young adults whose parents divorced recall the period “after my parents divorce” as painful and confusing. However, nearly all⁵ of the study’s conclusions — including the conclusion that “grown children from unhappy, low-conflict marriages generally fare better than those from ‘good’ divorces” — are based on an invalid study design. In particular, most findings from Between Two Worlds based on comparisons to the control group should be regarded as invalid and unproved.

(Related material: See the STATS critique of Between Two Worlds, including a response by Marquardt and Glenn, here and here.)

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where co-bloggers stay together for the sake of the readers. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

UPDATE: Read comment #18, for another significant flaw in this studies’ methodology.

1. ”Anderson Cooper 360,” November 22 2005. (back)
2. ”Poll Says Even Quiet Divorces Affect Children’s Paths,” New York Times, November 5 2005, p. A13. (back)
3. Source: Appendix “B” of Between Two Worlds, page 117, available online as a pdf file. (back)
4. It’s notable that this study was put together by an anti-divorce think tank, and has never been subjected to peer review. It’s natural to wonder if the peer review process could have forced the study’s authors, Elizabeth Marquardt and Professor Norval Glenn, to improve their methodology. (back)
5. I say “nearly all” because some of the findings — such as the greater likelihood of divorce among children of divorced parents — would not have been effected by the bad study design (back)

All¹ the legitimate social science research on the subject has shown that children of lesbian and gay parents turn out fine. This is a finding that horrifies the gay-bashers in the so-called “marriage movement,” and they’ve been working hard to deny these findings. One such paper frequently cited by anti-equality activists is Professor Steven Nock’s affidavit for the Canadian case Halpern v. Canada.

Unfortunately, Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz’s excellent and thorough critique of Steven Nock - an affidavit from that same trial - has not been read nearly as often. I suspect this is because the Stacey/Biblartz affidavit, while available on the web via a single obscure webpage, has not been on the web in a format that search engines can read and index.

For that reason, and with Professor Stacey’s kind permission, I’m posting a more search-engine-friendly version of the Stacey/Biblarz affidavit, in both .pdf format and html format. Hopefully, this will help bring Stacey/Biblartz’s critique of Professor Nock to the attention of more readers.

I’m sure I’ll find reasons to link to and quote Stacey and Biblarz in the future, but for now I’ll just quote their conclusion:

Research in the most rigorously peer-reviewed journals in child development and sociology provide generally accepted social scientific evidence that lesbian and gay parents are as fit, effective and successful as similar heterosexual parents. Likewise these studies find that children of same sex couples are as emotionally healthy and socially adjusted and at least as educationally and socially successful as children raised by heterosexual parents. Research even provides some suggestive evidence that there may be certain hidden advantages that lesbian parents and their children seem to enjoy. There is neither theory nor evidence that leads in the opposite direction.

Therefore, it seems surprising, if not disingenuous, that Professor Nock, who elsewhere emphasizes the benefits of marriage to parents, their children and society, is unwilling to anticipate that the same benefits, or least some of the same benefits, and perhaps additional benefits, would apply to same-sex marriages and their progeny.

Finally we would underscore that the issue before the court concerns the impact of marriage on lesbian and gay parenting. Lesbian and gay people have parented for a long time and will continue to do so. The question is under what conditions. Is it preferable for them to parent under conditions of invisibility, conditions of discrimination, or conditions of equality? It is difficult to imagine how anyone could argue in good faith that it is preferable to parent without access to equal recognition, social and legal resources, and benefits that other parents and their children enjoy.

1. The word “all” here is used literally, not hyperbolically. (back)

The recent New York Times article on transracial adoption, seemed to follow the typical pattern about how transracial adoption has been covered in the media in recent years. The stories tend to follow a sort of script. First, the authors start by telling the story of a white (American) couple (either in same sex or opposite sex relationships) who adopt a black (American) child. Second, the story goes on to note how much the parents love and care for the child and want to be ethno-racially literate. Next, the stories talk about how the Multiethnic Placement Act does not allow people to be denied adoption righs solely based on race, and somewhere soon after the authors cite the now famous statement from the National Association of Black Social Workers, which likened transracial adoption to cultural genocide. Fourth, the story will cite a few African Americans who are opposed to interracial adoption or leery of it. Then the story comes back full circle to the “loving white couple” who adopt the otherwise unadoptable black child. This sort of pattern is typical of almost all discussions of interracial families whether those families are created by adoption, marriage, cohabitation, or any other sort of interracial relationship that produces children.

This structure frames the issue as

1) love vs. race consciousness–The White adoptive family is viewed as loving, kind, and pseudo-colorblind. Black people are not even discussed in a family context. Individual African Americans are interviewed to give their professional opinion about whether or not race matters. When African Americans express reservations about the idea that love conquers all, they are viewed as indirectly attacking the love and commitment of the individual white families who transracially adopt.

2) black vs. white– One thing that is rather striking is that many of these articles is that the do not talk about all of the White families who adopt Chinese, Korean, or other east Asian children. These adoptions are framed as international adoptions, which is true, but they are also interracial. By the NYT’s own admission Euro-American families adopt Black children 1% of the time. Yes folks 1%, compared to 5% who adopt Asian children. Transracial usually means Black/White.

3) white savior vs. black nationalist–In many cases, the authors present the white adoptive parents saving the black child from some combination of “drug addiction,” “incarceration,” HIV, and/or impoverished mothers. (The NYT story is actually notable for not doing this.) Those who oppose transracial adoption or express concerns about its implementation are viewed as valuing racial solidarity over the well-being of children.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term framing. It refers to how the information is presented or discussed. I think this sort of framing creates the idea that whites are progressive and blacks are not. It also portrays the whites as sympathetic people, after all it is very easy to be sympathetic to adoptive parents, who often struggle to have their own biological children and end up raising children who are not their biological kids. The black social worker who notes that many whites are unprepared to deal with the full force of racism comes off as dry and clinical, as someone who would interrupt the “only family these kids know.”

Every time I read these stories I ask myself how could this story be reframed to recognize racism. See the studies follow a “multiculturalism” model, but they do not focus on institutional or interpersonal racism. In a multiculturalism model, individuals can become more diverse, by associating with people from different backgrounds or reading about the histories and traditions of various racial groups. White adoptive parents may learn about how to do their child’s hair or what sorts of food or cultural practices are common in the adopted child’s biological parents’ culture(s). The problem with this sort of approach is that it completely ignores racism. As I said in a recent entry, race is all to frequently reduced to culture, but the link between racism and power needs to be added to any discussion of transracial adoption. This is where the mass media often misses the point. Even if everything they are saying is true, we also need to talk about some of thing things that they do not say.

One way to look at racism is to think of adoption as an industry. While adoption agencies may be full of well meaning people, adoption is a market, like it or not. In the adoption market children are the commodity, and these commodities are assign monetary values. Sociologist Amanda Lewis has studied race in the adoption industry. In a presentation I saw in 2004, Lewis noted that Black children are put into a separate category in most adoption agencies. Lewis also found that the prices quoted for adopting Black children were significantly lower than those assigned to white children. In the adoption industry, healthy white babies are in high demand and low supply. I hate using economic language to talk about children in the ways that we talk about cars, jewels, or houses, but racism assigns a higher value to white babies. While love is certainly important in the adoption process, money and power are also important. There are more whites who want to adopt white babies and have the financial means to do so. Unfortunately, in some cases white families decide to adopt black children when they are unable to find or afford a healthy white child. The number of whites willing to adopt black children as a first option is very small, and if one were to read the chart presented with the NYT article very closely, they would notice the 1% figure cited above.

The adoptions industry places a high value on whiteness, not only for the children but also for the parents. The transracial adoption debate ignores the fact that our current racial order all but forbids blacks from adopting white children, and limits many blacks from adopting black children. When articles like the NYT article talk about the Multiethnic Placement Act, it is in the context of “whites having legal access to black children.” The problem with this sort of framing is that in the greater social structural context there is no assault on “white parenting.” The Euro-American middle and upper income models of family have never been under attack, but the assault on African American parents has been strong and persistent.

How have African American parents been under attack you ask? Well we can start with slavery, where marriage was forbidden, and children and spouses were routinely sold. The ability to maintain a “nuclear” family was impossible under such conditions; moreover, the traditional West African family is much more extended family oriented than European families (even today many West African families live in extended family compounds.). Now, I understand that slavery is long over, but it has set the stage for how black families in the US have been viewed. Black men and women have been viewed as hypersexual and oversexed, a stereotype that is still pervasive. Given this sort of stereotype, African American fertility and child rearing have been closely regulated (See Dorothy Robert’s book Killing the Black Body). Often times, Black parents are viewed as people who “pro-create without regard to the consequences.” This stereotype has been used to justify involuntary and coercive sterilization, and it has been used to remove black children from their families. Black families also took a hit after the infamous 1965 Moynihan Report, where Moynihan labeled African American family a “tangle of pathology” (and of course, we also shouldn’t forget he said African American families were matriarchal, a statement never authenticated by subsequent empirical studies). The now infamous statement released by black social workers was in the wake of the Moynihan Report.

Loving black parents and families are almost invisible in these debates and in the US society at large. In fact, I always find it funny that when I talk about how Black families and parents are viewed in society, someone has to bring up the Cosby Show. The Cosby Show is fiction folks, and it is but one example of a cultural product that showing loving intimate relationships in African American families. For every fictional Cosby Show we have five Losing Isaiah’s. Just like white parents black parents love their children, and most of the people who adopt black children are black couples and other black relatives (I have heard a some speculation that a high number of black children are adopted by black/white interracial couples, but I have never seen data on this, and it definitely doesn’t constitute a majority of adoptions of black or biracial children.).

The other sort of notion that these articles present is the sort of “love conquers all” mentality, which is naive at best and dangerous at worst. Love only provides a softer place to fall. It doesn’t challenge racism, and for white families who transracially adopt love, plus multicultural education is a great start, but this only works on the individual/small group level. In fact, in the era of colorblind racism very few people would ever acknowledge “hating” any ethnic group. Racism is not about love or hate; it is really about power. Love may be great for an individual child, but love doesn’t stop racism. Only social activism will stop racism, and if they asked the transracial adoptive parents the right sorts of questions in these interviews, they may find that the parents actually agree with my contention here.

If I were to reframe the transracial adoption debate, I would start with these questions/issues. Why we don’t debate the merits of black families adopting white babies? Why is transracial adoption focused primarily on black and white? I would also talk about how racism (not cultural variation) has shaped the lives of families, starting from slavery. I wouldn’t ask if “individual whites can raise black children” or “individual blacks can raise white children.” I would talk about the structure of the adoption industry and the ways that educational opportunities and job discrimination affect the number of African Americans who can afford adoption. I would talk about how infertility is constructed as a “white problem.” My concern is less with the individuals (although I have no objection to multicultural educators teaching whites who transracially adopt), and more with the social structure. Why are the majority of adoptions intraracial? Who has opportunities to adopt and why?

Personally, I think with the right education and experiences most people can raise a child of a different race, even though these sorts of education and experiences are not easy to cultivate. There may be challenges along the way, and racism will impact interracial families, whether its internalized in the parents, the adoption agencies, the school district, the labor market, or the fertility industry. However, the best question to ask is “how does racism affect the adoption process and the structure of families?” When covering the transracial adoption debate, that’s where media outlets should start.

Over on Moderately Insane, Sailorman - who has two daughters, ages 2 and 4 - writes:

I’m in a small new England community. We have a lot of well-minded liberal folks here. And that certainly helps. For example, their nursery school doesn’t permit any commercial images: No Barbie lunchboxes; no Dora shirts; no TV at all.

We also do our best to encourage things on our own. We don’t EVER show them broadcast TV–not at all–though we do let them watch winnie the pooh movies on occasion. We teach them to like bugs and mud.

But there are still plenty of confusing issues….

What do you do when your daughter’s good friend wants her to come over and watch TV?

What do I do about the fact the they always want to wear pretty dresses, not overalls? That they want to wear tutus? I *KNOW* they’re getting gender-socialized at school, but I don’t want to add to it if I can help things.

What do I do about the fact that their mom is, for the moment, a SAHM doing the vast majority of childcare? She’ll be back at work in a year or two, but (we’ve got a new infant and I often work 12 hour days) doesn’t want to go back until then.

Sailorman is particularly eager to hear specific advice, rather than general theory.

As far as the clothing issue goes, my advice is not to sweat it. There’s a perfectly reasonable, nonsexist reason Sailorman’s daughters might like pretty dresses: Pretty dresses are cool. Hell, I liked wearing dresses when I was a small boy (much to my grandfather’s horror, when he discovered me playing dress-up in my granny’s clothes!).

Raising girls to abhor the feminine isn’t really feminist. What’s feminist is allowing girls (and boys) to express their own tastes without regard to if their tastes are stereotypically girlish or boyish.

(Of course, as Sailorman points out, it’s not like his girls live in a vacuum; there’s no way, really, of knowing how much dress-preference is the girls expressing their individual tastes, and how much is gender conformity. I don’t know what the solution is to this, but I’m sure that feeling bad because many girls like dresses isn’t it.)

Anyhow, there’s more I could say, but I’d rather throw it to comments for now. Even if not all “Alas” readers are parents, probably at least half have been daughters at some point in your lives. What’s your advice?

From Media Matters:

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, reporter Jacqueline Froelich failed to challenge Arkansas Republican state Sen. Jim Holt’s assertion that “there are thousands of studies, actually … over 10,000″ that show “the homosexual family or the environment is problematic for the child.” Froelich did not address Holt’s dubious figure of 10,000 studies, which would be possible only if a new study reaching that conclusion had been released every day for the past 27 years.

In fact, the social science research overwhelmingly shows that there’s little or no significant difference between kids raised by same-sex and opposite-sex parents.

Curtsy: Echidne.

From a news story about “single women choosing to become single moms”:

Elkins, like many women her age, felt the pressures of wanting a child but realized that in the modern age she didn’t need a relationship with a man to make her dream possible. So she turned to an anonymous sperm donor to make her a mom.

[…] Places like California Cryobank, one of the largest sperm banks in the country, reports that single women make up 32 percent of the clients who buy sperm from its bank.

Fertility centers like those at New York University were originally set up for infertile couples. Now doctors consult with a growing number of single women looking to tackle motherhood alone.

“We’re definitely seeing more single women,” said Dr. Shelley Lee, a clinical psychologist and director of psychological services at NYU. “And particularly women who are professional women[…]”

Elizabeth at Family Scholars responds:

A 46 year old woman: Since I was 20 or 30, I would see a baby and my heart would melt, and there needed to be a child in my life…

A child: Since I was 3 or 4, I would see a father and my heart would melt, and there needed to be a father — my father — in my life…

Elizabeth often seems to assume that the typical child raised without her or his biological father pines for contact with that father - not in a “mild curiosity” fashion, but in a “truly suffering due to existential angst” fashion. But I’m not at all sure that’s true.

The academic journal Human Reproduction published a study of adolescents who were conceived through donor insemination (DI; also know as sperm donation). (Scheib, Riordan and Rubin, “Adolescents with open-identity sperm donors,” Human Reproduction 2005 20(1), pages 239-252). All of the adolescents grew up knowing that they had been conceived via DI. 41% were raised in households headed by lesbian couples, 38% raised by single women, and 21% in households headed by heterosexual couples.

Put another way, 79% were raised in completely fatherless households, and 100% in households without their natural fathers. Yet although 80% said they were “moderately likely” to ever want contact with their biological fathers at all, only 7% reported wanting a father/child relationship.

(It’s important to note that all of these families were open with their DI children about their origins from a young age. Many scholars believe that families that keep their children’s DI origins a secret actually make things harder on the children in the long run, because of the shock and feelings of being deceived when someone discovers their DI origins later in life.)

Admittedly, this study has a very small sample size, and the 60% response rate isn’t ideal. But even if the Human Reproduction study isn’t perfect, at least it’s some evidence. Nor is it the only such study; for instance, a 1998 study of DI children in Child Development found that “reports from both the parents and teachers on standardized measures of adjustment indicated that the children were well-adjusted and no differences emerged across households headed by single women, lesbian couples and heterosexual couples.” (Chan RW, Raboy B and Patterson CJ (1998) Psychosocial adjustment among children conceived via donor insemination by lesbian and heterosexual mothers. Child Dev. 69, 443–457. Summary quoted from Scheib (2005).).

(Other studies showing that DI children are well-adjusted include: Brewaeys A (2001) Review: Parent-child relationships and child development in donor insemination families. Human Reproduction Update 7, 38–46; Golombok S, MacCallum F, Goodman E and Rutter M (2002a) Families with children conceived by donor insemination: A follow-up at age 12. Child Dev 73, 952–968; Vanfraussen K, Ponjaert-Kristoffersen I and Brewaeys A (2003) Family functioning in lesbian families created by donor insemination. Am J Orthopsychiatry 73, 78–90.)

In contra