Going To Seed

“Pro-lifers threaten women’s baby rights”, screams The Observer. There is, of course, no moral right to have a baby. The NHS would simply refuse to fund anything else with a failure rate remotely approaching that of IVF.

And yes, the subject of this hysteria, the reasonable chance that MPs might have the wit to reinstate the requirement that a child’s need for a father be taken into consideration before agreeing to provide fertility treatment, might indeed spell the end of anonymous sperm donations and of the State’s impregnation of women who engage exclusively in homosexual acts. I certainly hope that it does, and I only regret that an argument being advanced against it is that men who are currently party to such arrangements are not financially responsible for the children thus engendered. They damn well ought to be.

It is bad enough to reduce fathers to sperm banks and cash machines. It is horrific to reduce them to one or the other.