Posted on 05/21/2006 11:55:33 AM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
Good for you for realizing that. So many women feel like they need a man for their children, without realizing how tough it is on the kids to have another man around, when when they already have a Daddy. Probably wouldn't be the same with a woman who is a widow, because her kids likely wouldn't have the same animosity toward someone she's dating.
Still, kids need their Moms, if she is the only parent in the house, and the tension created for her by trying to please two different 'camps' is tough on everyone.
Do they expect Mr. Goodbar or Mr. Godot to come by earlier?
Oh, do you think the baby should be killed instead?
I've been reading this thread since it was posted, and have some issues with the entire idea and so decided to sit it out.......until now.
Marajade has taken quite a bit of abuse for her stance here and has held her own, but because of a situation in my life I have to chime in here.
My daughter is almost 8, her best friend just turned 8. Her best friend's mother has become a close friend of mine, even though she is close to half my age. My daughter's best friend was conceived of a rape. My friend chose to have and keep her baby even though she was only 16 at the time. I would nominate this young woman as mother of the year in a heartbeat.
She has since married and now also has a 19 month old and you would never know that the older girl is not Daddy's girl. and at the risk of the wrath of my own husband and father of my child, I would nominate him as father of the year for BOTH of those girls.
We do not live in a cookie cutter world and there are no absolutes.
And those of us who are able should be asking if she needs any help from us. I must applaud her greatly for the decision she had made.
There are many posters in this thread that through no mistake of her own, wouldn't even consider marriage material. How terribly sad of a tale of society of today is that.
They're will need to carry a DNA signature with them so they can compare and weed out half-siblings. New use for cell phones, I guess (you saw it here first - recorded for posterity).
Yep.
Beer goggles? ;o)
Who needs a husband when you've got a rich uncle [sam]
Yep.
What I meant to say is, what if they are hideously ugly? I mean really, scare-little-children-on-the-street, elephant man ugly? And fat? What if they were morbidly obsese? Eight or nine hundred pounds and going through seven or eight buckets of KFC a day, the grease dripping from their acne-scarred faces in great, slow globules and over fingers the size and general shape of enormous sausages...
p.s.
But they still had "nice personalities."
Even they swore they would'nt touch one that stank. I had my doubts.
I'm talking farther on down the line here. This has been going on for quite a while, but when women start selling their ovum, then it will get a little messy. You know it's not just single women who take advantage of sperm donors. Infertile couples utilize these "services". This occurance could certainly happen in the generations to follow.
If African Americans fear Sickle Cell in their offspring, they most certainly get tested for that genetic abnormality, and the same for Jewish couples for Tay Sachs.
As far as the old fashioned bumpin' bellies, there are a lot of jokes out there. "Daddy stop it, yer crushin' my Marlboros"! Maybe I'm being an alarmist, but people need to be prudent. What ever happened to adoption?
...and some on this thread are uncaring, cruel even, to the plight of these women.
I think you're imagining a problem which cannot follow from the practices of egg and sperm donation. First of all, the few bits of serious research on the subject have shown that the incidence of serious genetic problems in children whose parents are very closely related is quite miniscule. Full siblings have the highest incidence, but still very low. Half-siblings and first cousins have rates that are negligible. I don't think there's been any empricial research (probably for lack of a large enough verified sample pool) of the offspring of parent-child sets of parents.
On top of that, the only incidences of widespread genetic problems have been in very small populations which interbred almost exclusively for many, many generations. That's simply not what's going on with egg and sperm donation. These aren't members of insular groups like the Saudi or Russian royal families, or of insular cults like the Mormon polygamist groups. Nor are the same egg and sperm donors being used across generations -- there's a very narrow age range accepted for donation through any remotely reputable agency, and most individual donors donate for a much shorter segment of their lives than the official age limits (i.e. men usually just for a couple of years while in college or grad school, and most women donate only once and few donate more than a handful of times.
Furthermore, genetic testing is fast approaching the point where people can easily check for genetic problems before having children, and an increasing number undoubtedly will. I recently read an article about an ultra-orthodox Jewish community, in which the rabbi normally must approve all marriages before they happen. Due to the high incidence of serious genetic diseases in this population (e.g. Tay-Sachs in particular), which is due in large part to being a small, insular, multi-generational interbreeding group, there is an increasingly popular voluntary service in which young men and women of marrying age have themselves tested for the common diseases, with the results being held confidentially (even from the testees), and shared with the rabbi only when a couple is being proposed for marriage. The rabbi then nixes the marriage if both parties are carriers for the same disease -- still with nobody but the rabbi and the testing agency knowing what disease(s) the parties were carriers for, or even if that was definitely the reason the rabbi nixed the marriage.
Problems caused by technology are usually quickly solved by technology as well. One enterprising adolescent boy tracked recently tracked down his sperm donor father through a combination of his own DNA test results, and online genealogy oriented DNA databases, and the very skimpy personal info normally provided to purchasers of donated sperm (e.g. ethnic background, major physical characteristics, level of education and major, number of siblings, etc.). The kid actually only directly found a close relative who had registered on a DNA database for genealogy purposes, and contacted that person, who checked with the actual donor (maybe checking with a handful of relatives who might have been sperm donors), who then agreed to be identified and meet the kid (probably quite proud of what a smart kid his genes had turned out).
Your worry is no more statistically well-founded than a young adult who knows he/she is adopted being worried that his/her prospective spouse might be a sibling or half-sibling. Yes, it COULD happen, but it would be so rare, and the chances of any serious negative consequences so tiny even in the rare cases it does happen, that nobody should be losing any sleep over it.
"Daddy stop it, yer crushin' my Marlboros"!
Okay, that's one I haven't heard. Please enlighten me...
Where do you see a "plight?"
Now there's a novel concept . . . ./sarc
Where do you see a "plight?"
Hugely, fat ugly women unable to get some guy drunk to get pregnant. You don't call that a plight?
Again, Shrinks, the number of war dead from Iraq/Afghanishtan is 0.000000013% of the total male population in the US. And that assumes all war dead are fathers. And if "going off on an arithmetic spree" by citing simple statistics to expose your analysis is troubling, well, welcome to FR. Facts count.
Nope, there's not such thing...only hugely fat ugly women unable to get the guy they want drunk enough to get them pregnant ;o)
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