Author Points Out 'Sexless' Pregnancy's Threat to Families
by Mary Rettig
October 6, 2005
(AgapePress) - Author and Stanford University research fellow Jennifer Roback Morse is pointing out a trend she finds very disturbing -- the increasing incidence of "instant" or "sexless" pregnancies. A recent article in the London Telegraph newspaper highlighted this rising trend among career-driven women in England who want to have children. Despite being perfectly healthy, many of these women either do not have the time or the inclination to start a relationship in order to create children naturally. So, instead, these career-focused women are turning in increasing numbers to in-vitro fertilization.
Morse, author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-Up World (Spence Publishing, 2005), contends that such "sexless pregnancies" only serve to further society's disconnect between having sex and the act of procreation. In effect, she says, something that should be an act of pure love is being replaced with technology.
"And many people who are using this technology to create a baby without sex are doing so precisely because they are afraid of having the relationship with the opposite-sex person that, for whatever reason, don't want to deal with," Morse asserts. "They think it's easier to have a baby basically by themselves, without having that relationship with the other person."
Those touting the "sexless pregnancy" option are trying to turn the right of a married couple into an individual right "so that a woman can have a baby on her own terms -- with or without getting involved with a man," the researcher says. "And this, I think, is deeply, deeply wrong from the point of view of the child," she adds, "because often what these technologies turn out to do is to create a situation where the mother has planned in advance that her child will never have a relationship with his or her father."
The children of "instant" pregnancies are forced by the mother's design into a fatherless home, where the sperm donor is, according to English law, a stranger, Morse contends. When that happens, she says, these children are then subject to all the troubles that tend to plague other single-parent homes.
Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
