The Incredible Shrinking Father

Here we have an essay detailing how men are lynching themselves by donating sperm.

The Incredible Shrinking Father

By Kay S. Hymowitz

City Journal May 8, 2007

Here’s a Delphic riddle for our times: When is your father not your father? Answer: when he’s a sperm donor. Consider a case now before the Kansas Supreme Court. An unmarried woman in her early thirties decided that she wanted a child and asked a friend to be a sperm donor. He agreed, one thing led to another, which led to a syringe of his sperm, which led to the birth of twins. The mother says that she always intended to raise the kids alone and never wanted the friend involved in their lives. The donor says that he planned to be the twins’ father in name and practice. There is no written contract. What does the contemporary Solomon do?


Well, in a Kansas trial court, Solomon rules that without a contract the twins have no father. The man who provided half of the children’s genetic material has no more relationship to them than does the taxi driver who rushed their mother to the hospital when she went into labor. Now, assuming that the supreme court upholds the decision, the state of Kansas can celebrate adding two more fatherless children to its population, and Mom can rejoice by dressing her twins in bibs—available over the Internet—proudly announcing: my daddy’s name is donor.

You’d think that we had enough problems keeping fathers around in this country, what with out-of-wedlock births (over a third of all children are born to unmarried women, and, in most cases, the fathers will fade from the picture) and divorce (the average divorced dad sees his kids less often than he takes his car in for an oil change). But these days, American fatherhood has yet another hostile force to contend with: artificial insemination. This may sound a tad overheated. After all, AI has been around, by some accounts, for over a century. And the number of kids born through the procedure each year, though steadily growing, remains quite small relative to the millions of babies conceived, as we can now say completely without irony, the old-fashioned way.

But aided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family. There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men promotes the very male carelessness that leads a lot of women to become single mothers in the first place. And fatherless families are a delicate proposition, as AI families are discovering, since all the scientists’ technology and all the lawyerly contracts can’t take human nature out of human reproduction...

There is nothing more idiotic than donating one's precious lifegiving fluid to total strangers; so they can birth another generation of bastards like me.

Being a fatherless child is a fate that I would not have chosen for myself.

The Illumined Duncan has blogged on this subject many a time on his Blogspot, Eternal Bachelor. In addition to his dead-on observations, which I highly encourage you to read, I would like to make a few comments of my own.

Every child deserves their mother and their father, whenever possible. I do understand that life happens, and sometimes things fall apart. Granted. But for a society to engage in mass breeding for the purpose of shits and profits is the sign of a culture that is truly doomed.

What most people don't know is that the ancient religions, and even our modern faiths of Judiaism, Christianity, and Islam, are firmly rooted in Male (and female) fertility worship. As a matter of fact, the waste of Sperm was a crime punishable by death in times gone by.

Consider:

And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother.

And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.

And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also (Genesis 38, 8-10).

Why was sperm so important to the ancients?

Because it was considered akin to the "rain" of God (Blessed be He), that fell from the sky to impregnate Mother Earth and bring forth fruit.

As above, so below. By his emission, man was truly the image of God (Blessed be He).
This idea of male fertility was a supremely important doctrine for the vast majority of
religious systems on earth, past and present.

For an brief introduction to fetility and its importance in religion, please see:

Sexual Symbolism in Religion

The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship

Sex in History

As a result of this reverence for the Male Lifeforce as being Set Apart, children were considered of the father, and not the mother.



(Virgin Mary and Jesus)





(Danae and the Golden Shower)



We can recognize the motiff in the story of the Holy Spirit foreshadowing the Virgin Mary, and the legend of Zeus impregnating Danae vis-a-vis a golden shower, thus producing the Greek hero Perseus.

Consider two excerpts from Eumenides, by Aeschylus, which tells us about the trial of Orestes, who stands accused of murdering his mother (who killed his father):




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(From left to right: goddess of wisdom Athena, Orestes, and the prophetic god Apollo. The vengeful Furies are standing in the background.)

APOLLO
I'll speak to that, as well. Make sure you note
how right my answer is. That word mother—
we give it to the one who bears the child.
However, she's no parent, just a nurse
to that new life embedded in her. 840
The parent is the one who plants the seed,
the father. Like a stranger for a stranger, [660]
she preserves the growing life, unless
god injures it. And I can offer proof
for what I say—a man can have a child
without a mother. Here's our witness,
here—Athena, child of Olympian Zeus.

[Apollo points to Athena]

No dark womb nursed her—no goddess bears
a child with ancestry like hers. Athena,
since I know so many other things, 850
I'll make your city and your people great.
That's why I sent this man a suppliant
to your own shrine, so he might prove himself,
then place eternal trust in you, dear goddess, [670]
and you could win a new ally in him,
in his descendants, too, and thus create
an everlasting bond with his posterity.

ATHENA
It's now my task to give my final verdict.
And I award my ballot to Orestes.
No mother gave me birth—that's why
in everything but marriage I support
the man with all my heart, a true child
of my father Zeus. Thus, that woman's death
I won't consider more significant. 940
She killed her husband, guardian of their home. [740]
If the votes are equal, Orestes wins.
Now, members of the jury, do your job.
Shake the ballots from the urns—and quickly.

Men, by voluntarily giving away their precious essence to sperm clinics and the like, cheapen themselves and their sacred honor. In addition, these "donors" make things that much harder for their fellow man, the children that are born from such unnatural unions, and society at large.

Man is the spark, the initiator. As such, it could be said that the stability of the world depends on the careful endowment of his sacred gifts to those ladies that are truly deserving.

Never underestimate your own worth. Never reduce yourself to a sperm donor.

Shinobi Kumogakure.