‘RIGHTS OF ADULTS MUST NOT TRUMP NEEDS OF CHILDREN’
by Breda O'Brien, Irish Times, Feb 2, 2008

Maybe I have lived through too many referenda, but my heart sank when I heard that there were people protesting outside where Elizabeth Marquardt was due to speak last Wednesday. Elizabeth, author of The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Clash Between Adults Rights and Children’s Needs was in Dublin at the request of the Iona Institute.

I need not have worried. Despite being part of an organisation called LGBT Noise, the protestors were quiet and respectful, and mainly interested in handing out their pink leaflets that cite the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychoanalytic Association. The gist of the content was that the gender of parents is irrelevant and being committed, nurturing and competent is all that matters. Allegedly, children raised by gay parents do just fine.

Some of the protestors attended the lecture, and again were model participants, which shows that it is possible to debate these issues without recourse to rancour or name-calling. It is too important a debate to ignore out of well-intentioned desires to prevent hurt, and too important to conduct in a way that is divisive and polarising.

Elizabeth Marquardt’s background is interesting. Born in 1970, her parents divorced when she was three, leading to her spending most of the year in North Carolina with her mother, and holidays with her dad in Washington. This experience shaped her, as did her mother’s subsequent re-marriage and eventual divorce from a much-loved stepfather who died by suicide when she was thirteen. She was fascinated by the dearth of research on the inner lives of children of divorce, and how they navigate having to travel between two worlds that become increasingly separate. She, along with Norval Glenn, conducted the first American national study of children of divorce. The conclusions are stark.

The consensus had been that if children of divorce did not end up with serious diagnosable problems, they were fine. Children are flexible and they adjust. (Funny how no-one ever suggests that adults should just adjust.) This study was the first of its kind to show that even children of divorce who go on to do reasonably well, or even very well, still had significant and challenging obstacles handed to them at a young age, obstacles they were often forced to overcome with little or no guidance or recognition. These young people by no means saw themselves as damaged goods, but they felt some bitterness at the lack of recognition of the difficulties they faced.

It took twenty-five years for the blithely optimistic consensus of researchers in the 1970s that children would be fine if their parents were happier after separating, to be undermined both by the testimony of the children themselves, and rigorous research. The prestigious American institutions that are happy to declare that gender doesn’t matter in parenting, are basing their conclusions on a handful of studies that bear an eerie resemblance to 1970s studies of children of divorce.

As has been pointed out by Marquardt and other researchers, these studies on lesbian and gay parenting are flawed on almost every level. They are small, and sometimes self-selected to the degree that they are based on email questionnaires solicited from lesbian women who have positive stories to tell about raising boys. Another serious problem is that many of the studies compare single lesbian mothers to single heterosexual mothers. In other words, they compare one type of family where a child is not being raised by a father with another type of family where a child is not being raised by a father.

Marquardt’s thesis is that mothers and fathers matter to children. Unlike Ireland, where marriage and family studies are in their infancy, there is now some acceptance in the US of the research that overwhelmingly shows children do best when reared by their mother and father in a low-conflict marriage. However, Marquardt points out that there is little awareness that the data is not at all as good for step-families, which at least points to the possibility that there is something about the biological connection that is important.

It is not just gay marriage that is re-defining marriage and parenthood, but it certainly makes it much more difficult to assert that the absence of a mother or a father is a serious loss for a child. In Spain, after legalised gay marriage, the birth certificate has been changed for all parents, from mother and father to Progenitor A and Progenitor B. Suddenly, it becomes insensitive and discriminatory to issue birth certificates that refer to mothers and fathers.

Of course, as Marquardt grimly points out, it has already gone far beyond that. Marquardt’s next book is called, My Daddy’s Name is Donor. Several courts have already recognised three legal parents for a child. Non-biologically connected, non-married people who have not undergone any form of screening such as adoptive parents face, have been declared to have the responsibilities and rights of parents. In theory, a situation could arise where there were five parents ­ the egg donor, the sperm donor, the surrogate mother, and the parents who eventually raise the child. Children of divorce find it hard enough to navigate the world of two parents. What about children conceived in this way?

Donor-conceived children are providing, sadly, a fascinating case study. Registries have been set up (www.donorsiblingregistry.com) to allow half-siblings of sperm donors to find each other. Many of them, some now young adults, feel robbed of their identity. They feel cheated that no-one thought it relevant to inquire what effect it would have on them to be deliberately conceived in a way that would separate them from a biological parent. Some children have thirty siblings. Others may have one hundred. It is inevitable that some will innocently meet and marry.

Marquardt is calling for a moratorium of at least five years to allow rigorous research,
a time when no legislatures, courts or commissions press forward with changes that undermine the importance of mothers and fathers in the lives of children. As she says, let’s not experiment on a generation of children and wait for the results to come in twenty years down the road. The rights of adults should not be allowed to trump the needs of children, where possible, to know and be loved by a mother and a father.