Published by The Telegraph on 20 January 2011.
The law should reflect that parenthood is not just a woman's job, says Allison Pearson.
Keith Macdonald is called Britain’s Most Feckless Father. Admittedly, competition for that title is fierce, but Keith established a comfortable lead on Monday night when BBC1’s Panorama asked him to name his children. Tall, wan and sepulchral as a Dickensian undertaker, Keith was hesitant at first, trying to recall the eight children by eight different women that his 25-year-old loins had spawned. He managed the first six names, but then, with two children still to go, he got stuck, shrugged, took a stab at the seventh before finally admitting defeat...
Giving life to eight blameless babies who will never know a father’s love and care, appears to be acceptable, but using a condom is repugnant. Welcome to 2011: post-morality and stigma-free. One in eight children under five will never meet the man who donated half their genes. Seventy per cent of young offenders were raised in a lone-parent home. It’s an anguished statistic. “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection,” said Sigmund Freud...
What takes your breath away is not just the social and ethical carnage that the change has wrought, but the speed with which it happened. As the Labour MP Frank Field says: “We’re the first generation in recorded history where society has not made the man who begets a child responsible for that child.”...
Frank Field, who has taken on the role of ''poverty tsar’’ for the Coalition, has suggested schools should start giving parenting lessons. I would go further. Boys need to be taught that fathers are not just sperm donors, they have an irreplaceable protective role to play in their children’s lives. Girls need to be taught that treating the father of your baby as if he’s a turkey baster with a benefits cheque attached is as damaging as it’s cruel...
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