Monday, March 20, 2006
The New American Family
I rarely ever watch 60 Minutes. Usually I find something more interesting on than bad news-magazine journalism, but this story itself snagged my attention.
The story, in case you don't care to read it yourself, is about the children who are born of either single or lesbian mothers by way of artificial insemination. These children have been raised without knowing who contributed half of their DNA to create them. This situation is not completely new to our culture, but its now becoming a very common practice, and according to the article over 300,000 children are created each year by artificial insemination.
That's a lot of kids.
A parent of one such child has started a social networking website that allows children born artificially to find their half sliblings around the world. They simply enter information about themselves, the donor number of the man who gave the sperm, andvoilaa.
 [Insert vignette of 5 gorgeous kids walking down some suburban street in the midwest, all looking quite similar]
Doesn't something seem very wrong with all of this? First, the fact that 300,000 children are born YEARLY to single or lesbian parents is a statistic that certainly blew my mind. More surprising is the fact that all of these children feel some need to find eachother and in some cases find who is their father. I think all of this has a lot to say about the nature/nurture arguement that has been very important to the alternative family movement. Maybe these kids will end up being great wonderful products of their societies, but doesn't it seem incredibly interesting that the more we try to alienate ourselves and separate ourselves from the way that we lived before modern technology and alternative living, the more the younger generations seem to want to find some way to reconnect themselves with it? ¶ 8:44 PM
The story, in case you don't care to read it yourself, is about the children who are born of either single or lesbian mothers by way of artificial insemination. These children have been raised without knowing who contributed half of their DNA to create them. This situation is not completely new to our culture, but its now becoming a very common practice, and according to the article over 300,000 children are created each year by artificial insemination.
That's a lot of kids.
A parent of one such child has started a social networking website that allows children born artificially to find their half sliblings around the world. They simply enter information about themselves, the donor number of the man who gave the sperm, andvoilaa.
 [Insert vignette of 5 gorgeous kids walking down some suburban street in the midwest, all looking quite similar]
Doesn't something seem very wrong with all of this? First, the fact that 300,000 children are born YEARLY to single or lesbian parents is a statistic that certainly blew my mind. More surprising is the fact that all of these children feel some need to find eachother and in some cases find who is their father. I think all of this has a lot to say about the nature/nurture arguement that has been very important to the alternative family movement. Maybe these kids will end up being great wonderful products of their societies, but doesn't it seem incredibly interesting that the more we try to alienate ourselves and separate ourselves from the way that we lived before modern technology and alternative living, the more the younger generations seem to want to find some way to reconnect themselves with it? ¶ 8:44 PM
