Children need a mother and a father

May 26, 2003
By Ron Crews

Martha Minow takes the absurd position in her Boston Globe article of October 27, 2002 ("It's people, not laws, that make a family") that, "For children, the marital status, biological or non-biological connection, and sexual orientation of parenting figures is irrelevant." If this were true, adoptive children would never seek out their biological parents. Biology does matter.

Would you dare tell children of a single parent that having a mother or father is irrelevant? Or would you say it to the little boy described in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in a 1998 article by Barbara Eisold, "Recreating Mother"? She reports on the reactions of a 4-year-old boy created by artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood for two homosexual men. "Daddy" and his partner Don, who is 20 years younger, decided to have a child. Daddy arranged an artificial insemination "with a woman in another land. In exchange for relinquishing all parental rights, she received excellent health care and financial recompense."

A hired nanny cared for the child, Nick. He began attending school when he was only 2. When he was 2 1/2 the nanny was abruptly fired and replaced. The replacement was also fired, and a third nanny hired. The men also adopted a second child.

At age 4 1/2 Nick began acting out and was sent to a female child psychologist, the fifth woman hired by his fathers. Nick lived in a world where "mommies" were hired and fired, so he fantasized about buying a new mother. The therapist described his desperate struggle to understand family relationships. "Nick was often beside himself with anxiety."

Eisold, apparently from the same school as Minow, appears to be genuinely surprised by the boy's reaction. She asks: "How do we explain why this child, the son of a male couple, seemed to need to construct a woman - 'Mother' - with whom he could play the role of a loving boy/man? How did such an idea enter his mind? What inspired his intensity on the subject?" She continues, "It is difficult to understand why two adults who share responsibility for children, whether they are partners, siblings, or a mother and her mother, would offer less of what children need than do married couples."

It is easy to understand. Men and women are different. There is ample evidence that children do best when they are raised in a home that contains one of each, preferably their biological parents.

The privileged status of marriage between a man and a woman by law sends a clear message: children need a mother and father who have made a public commitment to each other. Anything else creates a burden on the child. This is not to say that single mothers, divorced parents, adoptive parents, and grandparents don't do their best to make up for what is lost. In acknowledging that something is lost, we recognize that these situations create an additional burden for the child and the caregivers, a burden to which they often respond heroically, but a problem, which should, if at all possible, be avoided.
Ms. Minow's assertion that children don't care about the fact that they are not being raised by their biological father and mother and easily accept any substitute situation as normal, I would refer anyone who does not instantly recognize the foolishness of this statement to the above article.

Ms. Minow believes that gender and biology are irrelevant, while we believe that
these are realities that can be ignored only at the peril of children.
The amendment to the State Constitution Ms. Minow opposes seeks to prevent an unconscionable human experimentation on children.

(Ron Crews is the President of the Massachusetts Family Institute.)