The HFEB And Fatherhood

Gordon Brown has granted a free vote on the proposal to abolish fatherhood by abolishing the requirement that the need for a father be taken into account in IVF treatment. All hell has broken loose in certain circles. This free vote is allegedly legitimising discrimination against lesbians.

But it is a scientifically baseless and historically illiterate idea that the inclination towards homosexual acts (and it is acts, not persons, that are homosexual or heterosexual) is any basis for personal or collective identity.

The whole notion is barely two generations old. It post-dates by several years our own humane and necessary decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private.

In some historical or contemporary societies, all men, or all women, or everyone, engages in both homosexual and heterosexual acts. In others, there is no word for homosexuality.

There is simply no comparison whatever between a homosexual (or heterosexual) inclination and sex, or ethnicity, or even social class. The first two cannot be changed, whatever cosmetic procedures one might undergo. And even class is very hard to alter. At least arguably, while a family can change class over two or more generations, a single individual can never really do so.

Whereas many people go through an adolescent phase of same-sex attraction. And almost everyone who identifies with homosexuality has had some opposite-sex experience, again especially in adolescence.

You can’t have everything. You can’t demand the right to bring a child into the world on the express understanding that it will never have a father figure as such. This is in no way comparable to a parent’s death (before or after the child’s birth), or to the subsequent breakdown of a relationship. Those things are not deliberately contrived.

MPs should reject this clause (among others), or else reject the entire Bill at Third Reading.