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One of the things I enjoyed about my Sunday Telegraph days was the way the editor, Dominic Lawson, used to come up with subjects I wouldn't ordinarily have written about. This is a fairly typical example, on a trend that's only accelerated in the last decade:
It was a staple of 1960s sci-fi: the 21st-century society in which the sexual urge has been eliminated, and male and female workers shed their crimplene Nehru jackets strictly for the purpose of procreation, joining their pre-assigned partners in a sort of floating iron lung for a brief, clinical, unfelt encounter. At which point, some Sixties swinger arrives in a time machine and rekindles Female Worker No PZ3741-S27's long-suppressed human emotions by calling her "Honey".
But those Sixties futurists didn't know the half of it. The 21st century is upon us, the sexual urge is all there is, and the idea that you need a man and a woman to make a baby by being in the same room and taking their clothes off is almost impossibly quaint. The stork has diversified: you no longer have to look for his little bundles of joy under the gooseberry bush - you can order them online. And, as his traditional market - or, as The Guardian calls it, the "family lobby" - has shrunk, he's moved on to expand his share of key niche demographics. Now, infertile couples can have babies, and so can sexagenarian women, and gay men.
Take Barrie and Tony, a couple from Chelmsford, Essex. They'd been trying for a baby for some time, but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them that this might be because they're both male. So they found a woman who happened to have four eggs lying around that she hadn't yet auctioned over the Internet. You'd think two boys and a girl would have been enough, but they figured they needed someone else just to even up the numbers, so they roped in another woman who happened to have a rare nine-month vacancy in her Fallopian timeshare. After that, it was just a question of getting the girls in the mood: The lights down low, Johnny Mathis on the hi-fi, the FedEx package with Barrie and Tony's beaker of co-mingled sperm on the coffee table, the cheque for $200,000 in the mail, and the turkey baster wandering in from the kitchen with a come-hither look in his eye.
The result of this happy union is twins: a boy for him and a girl for him, as they almost sing in "Tea for Two". Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow are planning to name their son and daughter (or vice-versa) Aspen and Saffron Drewitt-Barlow. In a landmark decision in an American court, the proud parents will be the first British couple to both be named as father on the birth certificate, though neither mother rates a credit. The babies have not yet been born, but both mother and surrogate mother and co-father one and co-father two are doing well: Barrie and Tony still have a few eggs in the freezer from the same woman so, in a year or two, they intend to provide Aspen and Saffron with a sibling named after some other spice or ski resort. "This ruling," said Tony, "affirms that gay couples are entitled to the same fundamental procreative freedoms as heterosexual couples."
It's fair to say heterosexual couples of the old school did not think of "procreative freedom" as an "entitlement" - like, say, public education or a senior citizen's bus pass - but rather as, to use an archaic phrase, a "fact of life". Today, though, there are no "facts of life": de facto, it would seem biologically impossible for Messrs Drewitt and Barlow to come together to produce young Saffron or Aspen, but, de jure, it's a breeze. Neither parent supplied the egg, neither parent carried the child, neither even went to the minimal effort of personally ejecting the seed up the vaginal canal, but nonetheless the birth certificate will certify that they're responsible for the birth - essentially for the reason that that's the way they want it: Yes, sirs, that's your baby/No, sirs, we don't mean maybe. "The nuclear family as we know it is evolving," said Barrie. "The emphasis should not be on it being a father and a mother but on loving, nurturing parents, whether that be a single mother or a gay couple living in a committed relationship."
That's great news if you're a gay couple living in a committed relationship or a single mother living in several uncommitted relationships, but in the murky territory in between lurk all kinds of unsuitable parents. In Britain, as was reported last week, Penny and Stephen Greenwood's baby will emerge from the womb and immediately be taken away by social workers and put into foster care. The Greenwoods, of Bradford, who have already had one child confiscated by the state, are both epileptics and, although they insist their conditions are mild and controlled, the authorities aren't prepared to let them be loving, nurturing parents. Apparently, it could be very traumatising for a child to see his parent with his head thrown back and his tongue lolling out - unless, of course, it's at the local gay bath-house.
Despite the claims of the technobores, in the second half of the century hardly anything has changed - except the nature of change. A young man, propelled by an H G Wells time machine from 1899 to 1949, would be flummoxed at every turn. By contrast, a young man, catapulted from 1949 to 1999, would, on the surface, feel instantly at home: our bathrooms, kitchens, cars, planes and high-rises have barely altered. Instead, having run out of useful things to invent, we've reinvented ourselves and embarked, with a remarkable insouciance, on redefining human identity. In the two decades since the first test-tube baby, "procreative freedoms" have become the new frontier. We began with "a woman's right to choose" - whether or not to abort. Next came an Asian's right to choose the sex of his child and get rid of any unwanted girl foetus (at one point China had 153 boys for every 100 girls). We've now moved on to a couple's right to choose their baby's genetic characteristics on the Internet, a lesbian's right to choose to be impregnated by a gay male friend, and a career woman's right to choose to have her eggs frozen in her late 20s, stored away and fertilised in her 40s or 50s or whenever she feels she's ready to raise a baby. There is a logical progression in all this: if you have the right to end life (with abortion), surely you also have the right to decide when, where, how and with whom you wish to initiate it. And, in one sense, the culture of death and the culture of new life are a kind of balancing act: if there is a gay gene and straight parents start aborting their gay foetuses, it seems only fair to allow gay parenting as a kind of corrective. Likewise, if girl foetuses are shouldering an unfair percentage of abortions in regrettably mysogonist societies, female numbers can be kept up by human cloning - which, in theory, eliminates the need for sperm. And, if you don't need sperm, do you really need men? Women could go on cloning women until Amazons ruled the earth, except for a handful of gay male enclaves in West Hollywood and Miami.
Human cloning will happen, if only because there's a market for it - as there's proved to be with eggs and surrogates. If it were simply a matter of wanting to be "loving, nurturing parents", adoption would do it. But there's a biological imperative driving these advances. Since Barrie and Tony are so proud of their "committed relationship", it must be irksome to have to let Tracie the egg-donor and Rosalind the womb-renter into the picture, since neither woman has any commitment to the relationship once the cheque's cleared. Lesbian parents, like the pop star Melissa Etheridge and her partner Julie Cypher, would in future have no need of third parties: the clone of one would grow in the womb of the other - and what could be more loving and nurturing than that? The first human clone will enter the world in a clinic in Mexico or Morocco or some such, but one day she will come to the United States or Britain and endeavour to get a driving licence and at that point, even if cloning remains illegal in both jurisdictions, the state will balk at turning her away because she's officially a non-human. They will recognise her as a legal human being on the grounds that that's what Mexico says she is - just as the British authorities are recognising the California court's decision on Barrie and Tony.
The public will most likely go along with these innovations. Half a century ago, Ingrid Bergman gave birth out of wedlock and it almost finished her career. Now, single mother Jodie Foster is put on the cover of People magazine as a paragon of motherhood, and everyone thinks it's bad form to inquire who or where the dad is, never mind whether a woman who thinks the only function of a father is to get the globules of bodily fluid into the beaker and then push off is really such a great role model. As always, the assault on "traditional values" is more positively expressed as a tolerance for diversity.
"There is no one `perfect' model on which all family structures can be based," Barbra Streisand recently told America's leading gay newspaper, The Advocate. "If we surveyed human history, we would see representations of every type of possible social arrangement." Really? Miss Streisand doesn't give any examples, but you could survey all human history and be hard put to find any precedent for Barrie and Tony's arrangement. The truth is that, rather than returning to some pre-Judaeo-Christian utopia, we've chosen out of a kind of mass narcissism to embark on a radical rejection of a universal societal unit.
Maybe it will work out. Maybe in 15 years' time Aspen and Saffron will be sitting in class surrounded by offspring of lesbians and geriatrics plus a handful of clones, and they'll all be happy and well-adjusted. Or maybe they'll be like America's vast army of children born out of wedlock - statistically, six times more likely to develop drug habits or commit serious crimes. Either way, the "family lobby" can do little about it, except, as in America currently, object to grade-school youngsters having books like Why Melissa Has Two Mommies as a set text. In fact, these days, all too many children have two mommies - one "bio mom", one step- plus a couple of dads, mommy's current boyfriend, whatever. It's not Barrie and Tony who destroyed the nuclear family, but heterosexual parents who've trivialised traditional notions of family responsibility over the past 30 years. If it's hard to save "family values" from Barrie and Tony, it's because there's so little left to save.
from The Sunday Telegraph, October 31st 1999
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