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S i d e b a r
She Needs a Father, Not a Sperm Donor
By Donald DeMarco
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This Rock
Volume 19, Number 2
 February 2008 
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I have a Catholic friend who is blessed with the fortuitous combination of striking good looks, personal charm, musical ability, and apostolic zeal. These gifts are an invaluable asset for him in his special mission of reaching out to troubled teenagers. He has worked with young people between 12 and 20 for more than ten years, and he has heard many sad and shocking tales of woe. But a recent personal revelation set even him a little back on his heels.
He was getting ready for one of his talks when he kept noticing a girl, 16 years of age, who could not take her eyes off him. Finally, she approached him with a curious question: "Do you know how to surf?" The query was, at first, merely baffling. When he told his young admirer that he had, indeed, done a little surfing, he saw her eyes light up with excitement. Then, her face brimming with hope, she revealed the meaning behind her curious question: "My parents are gay and my mother got pregnant from a sperm donor who was a surfer dude. I was wondering if you were my father."
The sparkle in her eyes quickly vanished when he informed her that he could not have fathered her. The pain he felt, witnessing her sudden dejection, impelled him to offer her some hope and consolation: "To be honest, I wish I were your father because I can see how beautiful your heart is." How important it is, as Pope John Paul II pointed out in Love and Responsibility, to be "spiritual parents" for young people. "Spiritual kinship based on the union of souls," he wrote, "is often stronger than the kinship created by the blood tie. Spiritual paternity and maternity involve a certain transmission of personality" (261).
My friend will continue to minister to this girl as a retreat master and friend and prays that she might resolve her search in a personal relationship with her heavenly Father. But her anguish and desperation is truly heartbreaking.
A Child’s Hopeful Heart
The desire to know one’s father is both natural and ineradicable. It is a cruel and thoughtless act to bring a child into the world while deliberately depriving that child of knowledge of his father. The 16-year-old girl knows intuitively that her mommy’s girlfriend does not satisfy her need for a father. Children’s needs are usually far more realistic than adult desires. How unjust parents are when their personal desires are incompatible with their children’s spiritual needs.
Will this young woman continue to approach athletic men who are complete strangers to her and ask which of them might be her father? Her own biological father had no concern for her spiritual needs whatsoever. It would be a mercy if she never met him. On the other hand, it would be a blessing for her to meet a spiritual father who can minister to her needs.
The Vatican document on reproductive technology, Donum Vitae ("Gift of Life"), tells us:
Heterologous [involving a third party] fertilization violates the rights of the child; it deprives him of his filial relationship with his parental origins and can hinder the maturing of his personal identity . . . Such damage to the personal relationships within the family has repercussions on civil society. (DV 5§II)
Another friend of mine, known to her readers as Maggie Gallagher, returned to the Catholic Church "because of its realistic, uplifting teachings on love and family." Maggie makes absolutely no concessions to political correctness or voguish ideas. "We have to stop pretending," she writes, "that all choices are equally good—that single motherhood is just an alternate family form and that fathers are just another new disposable item in the nursery."
And how does Maggie understand a child’s need for a father? "Children not only need a father, they long for one, irrationally, with all the undiluted strength of a child’s hopeful heart."
Fathers Are Not "Lifestyle" Options
Karin Hoenig, a single mom, remembers the day when her daughter, barely three at the time, came to her with the inevitable question, "Do I have a daddy?" Ms. Hoenig, a New York City nursery-school teacher, knew that the real story is far too complicated and therefore gave her daughter a simplified version: "No, you don’t have a daddy. But there was a man who provided the seed I needed to make a baby" ("Single Mothers by Choice," New York Times, August 5, 1993). This "agricultural" explanation does not begin to deal with the void this child has in not having a father. A "seed" is not an adequate replacement for a daddy. No child has ever had a natural desire for a mommy and a seed!
"Single Mothers by Choice," is a national organization with 3,000 members spread out over 20 chapters. But rationalizations, workshops, and newsletters will never efface a child’s need for a father. Would the rhetoric of "Single Mothers by Choice" have brought peace of mind to the likes of Marilyn Monroe, to take but one notorious example, whose desperate searching in the wrong places for her father led to her tragic downfall?
There is no political or rhetorical solution to the problem of fatherlessness. The need for a father is natural, just as natural as the need for food, love, peace, happiness, and, most of all, for God. Fathers are not merely lifestyle options, as many have been duped into believing. They are, in a word, indispensable.
The Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Albert Camus, was killed at the age of 46 in a car crash near Paris in 1960. Near the wreckage, investigators found a black briefcase that contained 144 pages of an autobiographical novel he had been preparing. When it was finally published, 34 years later, it contained these poignant words, reflecting how much he lost when his father was killed in the First World War in 1914: "I tried to discover as a child what was right and wrong since no one around could tell me. And now I recognize that everything had abandoned me, that I need someone to show me the way, to blame and praise me . . . I need a father."
Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University and adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary and at Mater Ecclesiae College.
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