The New York Times story today on pre-conception co-parenting arrangements, in which I was quoted, will, I’m told, be the subject of a segment on the Today show Monday morning in the 8 am eastern hour.
They’re taping today and unfortunately not able to patch me in from the Chicago studio, but I’m told they’ll include a statement from me.
Categories: General
Should be interesting. By the way I looked up some of the co-parenting sites and they are sites for donor reproduction with co- parenting as one of the options.
The definition of co- parenting is very loose and seems to include open donor reproduction.
This comment is for David Blankenhorn, who deleted a thoughtful (if I do say so myself) comment in response to Bridget’s evocation of gay men as pedophile predators and threatened me with banning me from the comments page. Such a threat is utterly meaningless to me. I consider the comments, I leave here a contribution. If anything, you should be thanking me, not deleting my comments.
But your routinely allowing such comments as those by Bridget and others makes me utterly doubt any sincerity on your part in creating a respectful dialogue about marriage. If it is acceptable for people to accuse gay people of being pedophiles and predators, but unacceptable for gay people to respond that such charges are ignorant and malicious, then your attempt to establish a “respectful dialogue” is meaningless. It is not respectful to allow trolls and others to make such comments.
Why is this so hard to understand? Perhaps you have spent too much time with NOM and other anti-gay people who routinely say things like that. You may think that such comments actually are respectful. Whatever the reason, no self-respecting gay person is going to join your proposed new movement.
Rob: I respect you and I respect your views. But you may not, on this site, call specific individuals ugly names. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. We are trying to have a certain kind of conversation — not that we always succeed! — and that conversation cannot take place if what mainly goes on is name-calling and accusations of bad faith. Please hear me on this. You seem like a smart guy. For my part, I am willing to forget that you are calling me names too (“spent too much time with … ). Please try, with self-respect intact, to see and possibly (if you want to) cooperate with what we are trying to do here.
I think the term co parent is about as lame as it gets. People get two parents. That’s all. That’s it. I know people I’ve helped will disagree with me but in reality you get a set of two and the only way you get any other kind of parent besides a step parent or an in-law is if one of your parents fails to take care of you. Two parents both raising their child are just parents. Parent is singular. Parent’s is plural. To refer to two people as someone’s parents tells you nothing of their romantic involvement with one another. It does not imply that they are now or ever were married so I don’t see the need for a new term like co parents. Parents implies two already. People are using the term as if parents is the term for married people with kids and we need a term for unmarried people with kids. Well, we don’t and it seems like more shifty word play to me.
whoops parents is plural. Parent’s is possessive. Thank you I’ll take my seat now.
marilyn, I think the term “co-parenting” started with divorced parents. I think they came up with the phrase to get across the idea that they are working together for their kids, not fighting and pulling the poor kid apart. It’s also a way to describe their relationship that they sometimes like better than saying ex.
I think co-parent gets across the idea that they are still connected, even if they are no longer husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend.
But what confuses me is that there is nothing about the term parents that implies that parents are necessarily married. and Co parents does not imply that they are not married per se either. You could say unmarried parents or divorced or separated parents but I just don’t get the whole need for clarification about being unmarried when the word they are choosing does not actually describe unmarried parents nor does it actually say anything different than the word parents. parents coperate raising their children married or not
So my all the kids I know with divorced parents instead of calling them their parents I should refer to them as her co parents? and just exactly whom are they co parenting with? Its almost like a descriptive term for parents who give their children up for adoption because they share the title of parents with the adoptiing party. That is the people who adopt are helping the parents raise their child so they all cooperate in that effort by say turning over control and custody but the parents still get visitation or something. So I know what they are trying to make it mean its just pointless newspeak reinforcing the idean that regular normal parents are married to eachother and we need a special word for parents who are not. We don’t need a special word for it and now that I figured out what bugs me about it I’m not going to use it.
If I can lear to stop useing the term donor conception and learn to stop saying children when I’m really just talking about people then I can learn to say heck no to co-parents. Language is a big deal plain language.
i suppose its because what else do you call him? can’t say “my ex”. so you say my co parent. guess I’m old fashioned i say my kids father.
Well, I’m not sure what language to use. This is something some people prefer, but maybe others don’t.
What strikes me here, though, is that the websites sponsoring this leave it up to the couple to decide what co-parenting means. It seems to mean have a sperm donor and keep contact with him and share parenting in a way that you agree to.
So it could range from the kid knows who their father is and sees him every now and then to the guy has a room in the mom-to-be’s apartment, even though they are not romantically involved and never will be. (Those are two examples in articles on it.)
http://todayhealth.today.com/_news/2013/02/11/16924967-will-couple-less-co-parenting-take-off?lite
Ki’s a rebel and I love it. You out of the box thinker. Father how novel.
What is critical Diane is that people be named as parents on the birth records of their own offspring so that they can be held responsible for their care and upbringing. To the extent that couples can work out the support and custody arrangements privately that is wonderful and if they can’t, that is what courts do. We nned to get rid of the concept of a sperm or egg donor or sperm and egg donors who donate embryos. Before a person has offspring, they are just a person and after their offspring are born, they are just parents.
@Marilyn – I don’t think this is enough.
“What is critical Diane is that people be named as parents on the birth records of their own offspring so that they can be held responsible for their care and upbringing. To the extent that couples can work out the support and custody arrangements privately that is wonderful and if they can’t, that is what courts do.”
What I mean is, if the mother and father agree that the mom will just bring the baby up and the kid will see the father on Thanksgiving, that’s not really fair to the kid.
Kids want and deserve more from a parent.
I know that many children will already end up with a parent (usually a father) who is not really in their lives. Sometimes that is the best thing for the kid, sometimes that is unfortunate, but how life worked out.
But just as with donor conception, the problem is the idea that you would plan to raise a child that way from the get-go.
And even if the father is involved in the kid’s life, there is a certain strain to joint custody that children don’t like. Sometimes that’s how life works out, but should we plan it that way?
Going back to a question that was raised about co-parenting on an earlier blog – what can you do about this?
This isn’t an illegal thing to do. I don’t think you could come up with a law against it that didn’t cause more harm than anything else.
You could say from a legal point of view that if the couple can’t work things out, you are going to treat them the way you treat any set of parents. In other words, they will be expected to pay for the kid and to share custody of the kid, whether they want to or not.
But I don’t really favor legal remedies. I think this is a case where it’s more important to talk about what’s wrong with this plan.
I think persuasion would be more effective here, and I also think that a huge part of the problem is that these are people who just don’t get it. They’re not thinking clearly.
They’ve never had kids. It’s really hard to get the idea that you will work all the time and you can’t just go off by yourself for the next five years. It’s also hard to understand how hard it is to work out conflicts about child-rearing with someone, even if you get along.
If you read the things the parents are saying, they don’t sound that together. They want kids and they’re afraid they won’t get them if they look for someone. One couple went ahead and made a baby before writing up any legal papers to figure out how they would share the rights and responsibilities of parents.
One of the women was raised without her dad and doesn’t want her child to go through that. I’m not sure she gets that her child might not want to go through living with dad in a separate house or negotiating step-parents.
So there needs to be some public discussion about whether or not this is fair to children and an okay thing to do.
I do think that running a website trying to match people up this way is wrong – like advertising cigarettes or making portion sizes bigger at fast food chains.
Persuasion is going to be ineffective for this particular group of people: gay men who have not found a partner willing to parent with them and who recognize that they would have great difficulty adopting; and women in their forties whose biological clocks are rapidly running out.
Again, from my comment on the previous post: this isn’t a trend that is likely to hit those in their early twenties or thirties—this is a biological clock issue more than anything. There aren’t enough men to go around, so women who have not been able to find a husband after two decades of looking, but who still want to parent, are jumping on this particular lifeboat. Notable was that two of the women featured were already single mothers—pretty sure they’re thinking that with this arrangement, they’ve got nowhere to go but “up”. At least these guys seem interested in parenting, and since they’re gay, their own parents are probably very interested in having grandchildren (hence, a greater likelihood of social support than is typical with divorced or broken-up couples).
Well, LaLubu, I hope you’re wrong. I’d like to think that talking to people about the effects of their actions can do something.
But what would you do?
What are you going to tell the women who are already mothers? That they are lousy parents? That it is not possible to raise an emotionally healthy child without a husband? They already know this isn’t true, and can provide you with examples. The women who aren’t yet mothers are taking as their example the many single mothers they know who are raising children. They look at that and figure, well—she’s doing it right, we’re a lot alike, there’s no reason to think I can’t do it right too.
The only women who are doing this are the ones who are looking down the barrel of menopause. No one else is doing this. Moreover, these aren’t poor women. These are middle-class women with educations and good jobs. Their compare-and-contrast re: the risks of single parenting really is not the same as those of single mothers with fewer resources. The women who are considering these co-parenting arrangements, half the women they know are single or divorced mothers. They’ve watched the kids of these mothers grow up and go to college and make something of themselves just like the children of the married people they know. Statistics are not going to scare them.
What would I tell them? I’d tell them that they’re much better off doing this than picking up some joker at some bar somewhere to get pregnant…but that’s redundant advice. They already know that’s an option and have rejected it.
Look. It’s not that they don’t want marriage. They do. They’ve run out of time. One of the issues of the new economy is that people require a lot more education to have a healthy, comfortable life (rather than a life of struggle and the skids). And this presents a game of musical chairs for women who’d like to have The Good Life (the same standard of living my high-school dropout grandparents could give their children from their unionized factory jobs). The men who are also taking the educational path aren’t in any hurry to get married—they have all the time in the world. The women don’t. There is a mismatch between the number of women who would like to have a family and the number of men who want the same thing—and are economically stable enough to contribute to a family.
In other words, this is a structural problem. I propose an experiment: let’s pick any economically abandoned rust-belt city (I can think of several I’d recommend in Illinois). Now, let’s create full employment there. Full employment in unionized, skilled labor jobs that anyone with a high school education has access to. Just walk right in—boom! you got a job. Jobs with full benefits, including healthcare and pension. And wait ten years. I predict that in that community, there would be a renaissance of marriage and that the divorce rate would be much lower than similar communities without that level of employment and compensation.
Still waiting for someone to prove me wrong on that one.
“gay men who have not found a partner willing to parent with them and who recognize that they would have great difficulty adopting; and women in their forties whose biological clocks are rapidly running out.”
So they won’t conceive a child, big deal. After all, what makes them people is not the ability to conceive a child, right? What makes anyone think it is so utterly important to conceive a child? Tough toenails, the world will go on without their progeny just fine, in fact probably better.
Now that said, we shouldn’t be careless with people’s health and fertility, people have a right to marry and procreate and we need to protect that right and protect people’s ability to marry and procreate with their spouse. So we can’t be cavalier and say it doesn’t matter if people are thwarted from marriage or lose their fertility and we can’t let people be prohibited from conceiving children, because it is a basic human right that is fundamental to the very existence and survival of the [human] race.
“I don’t think you could come up with a law against it that didn’t cause more harm than anything else.”
Easy, prohibit intentional unmarried conception, with the potential of huge fines and jail for everyone that facilitates it, as well as threat to place the child with parents who don’t objectify children as property.
That would shut down sperm banks and internet sites immediately, and stop people from publicly pursuing these arrangements. Where is the harm in stopping donor conception?
small problem; the constitution.
BWAhahahaha! Funny! Not gonna happen. Not just because of the Constitution, not just because the easy workaround for this is “whoops!” (and there is no means for determining what is intentional vs. accidental pregnancy)….no. Those children you’d prefer to whisk away into the hands of strangers don’t just have parents, they have grandparents and extended family. Family that does not care about the marital state of their parents, and warmly welcome the child.
The reason cultural change on unmarried motherhood changed so rapidly isn’t just because of the women’s movement. (unmarried fatherhood never was a problem—just deny parentage and dump the pregnant girlfriend, problem solved.) People have fewer children now. Which means they aren’t as anxious to alienate or estrange themselves from their children. People with seven kids could always kick out the disgraciada (while still embracing her brother, who impregnated a couple of other women prior to getting married); people with one or two children, not so much. Not if they value grandchildren. And they do, so…
Diane M.: You want to convince these women that they would be better off getting married; that their future children would be better off with a father that is married to their mother. Congratulations! You already have. That was the ideal that these women all pursued. And now they have run out of time, and are moving to Plan B.
We live in a culture where, if you don’t have blood family, your chances of having a replacement for that blood family are slim to none. We live in a country where very few people have access to their actual extended family more than once a year (jobs aren’t available just anywhere), so telling them to just work in a little time with relatives’ children as a substitute for parenting isn’t going to work. Being “the cool auntie” isn’t a possibility if they are only children themselves. You suspect that men who aren’t married to their child’s mother aren’t as likely to bond with their children. Fair enough. But….people who don’t have a blood or marital connection are far less likely to ever find family. Our culture does not have an institution of “adopting” older, childless, non-related adults into families.
It’s fair to say that people who haven’t parented before don’t quite know what they’re getting into (but that’s true regardless of their marital state). But it’s also fair to recognize that these are older women, women who’ve had a fair share of life experience. Some of that experience has been seeing what happens to even older, childless women (or men…..but the women live longer). Childless people don’t fare well in old age. Extended family isn’t around geographically (or emotionally for that matter; it’s hard to form bonds with the younger generation when you only get to see them once a year, or once every couple of years).
Meanwhile, adopting isn’t as easy for single people, men or women. It is even harder for older people, men or women. And yet even harder for gay or lesbian people. I suspect you wouldn’t be opposed to any of these people adopting (or maybe you would!), but it isn’t a realistic option for the most part.
What do you think you can say to these people that is going to convince them to embrace childlessness? What could someone have said to you, had you been in their position, to embrace childlessness?
Right, after the law, the only children that are still born to unwed parents would be “whoops” and therefore not affected by the law. We’d take their word for it that it was unintentional. And the children that would be affected by the law wouldn’t exist, because we would have shut down the sperm banks and websites that facilitate intentional unmarried conception. Unmarried individuals have no constitutional right to do those things to intentionally get pregnant. There is not even a right to fornicate, which isn’t a biblical moral thing, fornication is a legal term, and fornication laws were respected by the Supreme Court in Zablocki, not overturned. No case has overturned them.
Wow, hey Marilynn get a load of this. La Luba says: “Those children you’d prefer to whisk away into the hands of strangers don’t just have parents, they have grandparents and extended family.”
Hello, did you forget what we were discussing? Donor conception separates children away from parents and grandparents and extended family, sometimes even from both of their parents. And that happens frequently, and you condone it and want it to continue.
My proposal would not separate any children from any of their parents because all children would be born to married couples (except unintentional pregnancies, but both parents would still be around.) There would be no children born of donor conception or intentional conception, and if someone goes ahead and does it anyway and is caught, then the child is better off in the care of different strangers that have concern for children and human dignity.
Manny, the people described in this article are not planning to take the child away from its parents.
They are planning something that is not quite the same thing as donor conception, although it’s not clear how involved the biological parents would be in their children’s lives.
So the question is it right to take a child and plan to raise it with parents who are like a divorced couple?
But what if they decide to share custody of the child unequally – is that okay?
At what point does the child’s best interest come in and trump what the parents want?
LaLubu – Your argument seems to end up with the conclusion that women are going to want to do this and not care about what it does to their kids because:
a) the consequences won’t be that dire and obvious to them
and
b) they really, really want to have kids.
I’m not sure where to go with that except that somehow people have to take a stand and talk about whether or not it’s okay to deliberately make kids because you want them without considering the interest of the kids.
That’s true Diane, I had forgotten the circumstances here. It’s not donor conception. But it is still intentional unmarried conception and they are public about their intention, perhaps they were even public that they didn’t have sex, so they can’t get away with saying “whoops.” If they kept it secret how she got pregnant with his baby, they could get away with it and wouldn’t be spreading bad ideas as though it was OK. I think the child’s best interests are in being taken from such irresponsible parents and out of that strange pre-planned two worlds situation and placed in foster care, so they regain their dignity. Record the parent’s names on the birth certificate, but don’t let them get away with keeping custody.
Diane, I fail to see how this arrangement is different from any other form of single parenting. I know you mention that this is deliberate creation of children from an unmarried relationship, but frankly, anytime an unmarried pregnant women does not have an abortion or place her child for adoption, she is *also* deliberately bringing a child into the world without being married to the father (when she just as easily could have chosen differently).
Mind you, I think this arrangement is unusual. To me, it sounds like the equivalent of an arranged, loveless marriage. But the circumstances behind it are what brought it into being: namely, a mismatch in the ratio of women to marriageable men in certain geographic areas, along with the immutable biological clock; and a greater acceptance of gay men coming out of the closet and leading lives as gay men. Back in the day, gay men just got married to women, became fathers, and led a double life Kor, left the closet and got a divorce). Back when manufacturing was strong, there were greater numbers of marriageable men, and there was less of an imbalance in the sex ratio in cities. Arranged co-parenting is very much a product of our times, and straight men aren’t doing it because they don’t have to (no biological clock).
You are free to speak out against it. I’m just noting that you will have the same lack of success as all those who advocate for single women to place their children for adoption rather than raise their child themselves, and for much the same reason. Your efforts would be better spent advocating for a variety of means that mitigate the artificial choice of children or good job. Like say, dirt-cheap college tuition, low-interest student loans, and plentiful on-campus childcare and family housing that make it easier for college students to not have to wait for years after graduation before starting a family. And plenty of good-paying, full-benefit jobs for non-college educated people.
“I know you mention that this is deliberate creation of children from an unmarried relationship, but frankly, anytime an unmarried pregnant women does not have an abortion or place her child for adoption, she is *also* deliberately bringing a child into the world without being married to the father (when she just as easily could have chosen differently). ”
That’s why the law should prohibit intentional unmarried conception, not intentional unmarried birth. For one thing, at the time of conception, the choice is shared by the man and the woman, they consensually commit the crime and take the risks together. It is burdensome on women to imply that the man didn’t consent to conceiving a child since the woman still has the final choice about bringing the child into the world. That is why many men feel justified in ditching their child, saying that it was her choice to have the baby, not his. It’s better to say that the choice to bring a child into the world happens at conception, and not put it all in the woman’s lap.
@LaLubu – I don’t think the situation with these women is really due to the lack of manufacturing jobs. As you said, these are probably educated women. They’ve ended up unmarried for some reason, but I don’t think it’s the economy. One of the women in the article talked about having a 10 year relationship end right before she decided to do this.
Also, I think there is profound difference between accidentally becoming pregnant and choosing not to have an abortion and deciding to become pregnant. For many Americans, having an abortion would go against their conscience and I don’t support forcing or pushing people to do that.
Sure, but blue-collar men with high wages and good benefits tend to marry women with bachelor’s degrees. Middle-income educated women see blue-collar men with high wages as a “good catch”—they just don’t want to marry men with low-wage, no-benefit jobs (and the same goes for high-earning blue-collar men; they don’t consider low-earning women for marriage).
And I think it speaks to her integrity that she did not accidentally-on-purpose get pregnant by this man. It offers more proof that she was really looking for marriage, and is only taking this route because she won’t otherwise have a chance for parenthood.
Manny, this is only your opinion. Sex without marriage is not a crime. No one is arrested for it. Go ahead, call the police. Tell them that you’d like to report some fornication in your neighborhood. That’ll give some much needed laughter and stress-relief to some cops.
>they just don’t want to marry men with low-wage, no-benefit jobs
And since they weren’t stuck sharing these men’s poor fortunes, they had no interest in them anymore. As now single women voted for things that made women’s lives better, it came at the expense of the men they weren’t stuck with anymore, but oh they deserved it because they were men. Back when our fortunes were tied together, we cared about each other’s fortunes more.
>same goes for high-earning blue-collar men; they don’t consider low-earning women for marriage
This is a result of feminism. Men used to marry women with no income at all, if the woman was attractive and made him feel good (I don’t mean physically, but overall). It was quite normal for a young man to sweep a young admiring shopgirl off her feet. Now the shopgirl has to compete with lots of career women out looking for their equals, and now that marriage doesn’t guarantee a man anything but alimony and losing half his property, finding a rich wife that won’t leave you broke is just smart.
Though that phenomenon (and all of feminism) might be ending, there are alpha-mentors like roissy who are advising men to go back to shopgirls, because not only are they nicer and younger and more attractive, but men can be better men and make them happier and find long term love because they are more respectful.
Re: That’s why the law should prohibit intentional unmarried conception, not intentional unmarried birth
John Howard, how the hell would you do that?
A lot of unmarried conception is ‘accidental’, not ‘intentional’, and even intentional unmarried conception isn’t a crime, for good reason.
I also don’t have a particular problem with this ‘co-parenting’ deal, as far as I understand it.
Re: Though that phenomenon (and all of feminism) might be ending, there are alpha-mentors like roissy who are advising men to go back to shopgirls, because not only are they nicer and younger and more attractive, but men can be better men and make them happier and find long term love because they are more respectful.
I think that advice makes a lot of sense, and if it helps to end feminism as we know it, so much the better.
In my experience, men look for their equals for reasons other than money. They want to be able to have conversations with them. They want the social status that goes with a woman and her family. And they want their children to benefit from the social capital that an educated mother can give them.
No doubt there have always been men who married women who weren’t in their class, but most marriages have always been between people of similar classes. In fact, traditional society probably reinforced that because marriage involved the extended family.
You might also want to remember that in a day when women in general didn’t go to college, a man might find a woman from a similar background to his working in his office, etc.
“A lot of unmarried conception is ‘accidental’, not ‘intentional’, and even intentional unmarried conception isn’t a crime, for good reason.”
I know, the accidental unmarried conception shouldn’t be a crime, only intentional. Kind of like the distinction between manslaughter and murder is lack of intent, and they are not punished the same amount for that reason. The effect of the law would be to shut down donor conception and other forms of intentional unmarried conception, because only married conception is a right. It would not punish accidental pregnancies.
“I also don’t have a particular problem with this ‘co-parenting’ deal, as far as I understand it. ”
The problem is that they cross the line, by flagrantly publicly being unmarried and not together, intentionally conceiving a child together. We all can see the line they are crossing, that’s why we are talking about it, and that’s exactly what’s wrong about it.
Manny, you clearly live in an alternate reality than the one I see everyday. In any case, I’m glad to know I have the honor of knowing a better class of men than you do—men who actually appreciate that women have greater opportunities than in the days of yore, not only for their wives but for their daughters.