A Father’s Role Should Not Be Dismissed

Re “And Baby Makes . . . Two” (Aug. 3): I’m a woman in my 30s, single, well-educated, and professional, very similar to the women described in your article.

I fervently disagree with the decision these women made to rear children in fatherless homes. There are always worse situations for children, as noted in the article, but that is no justification for depriving a child of a father.

Since artificial insemination has become a more viable option for single women, instant parenthood can be attained after a visit to the local sperm bank. It’s quick, it’s easy, celebrities are doing it. Heck, finding the right man, building a relationship that eventually leads to marriage with the proper foundation to support a family could take years.

I happen to believe this movement is insulting and disrespectful to men. Fathers are important and to diminish their role is merely an excuse for these women to do what they want.

JULLIANA KUTCHMA

Hermosa Beach

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Re “And Baby Makes Two” about unmarried women who choose to have a child on their own:

In a country overflowing with children raised in single-parent households, it is truly disturbing to read of a trend whereby this condition is purposely imposed on children by some women.

Supporters of this practice are quick to cite studies that seem to trivialize the importance of a father in the development of a child. However, as you pointed out in “Who Says the Lack of a Father Is Always Bad? on Aug. 10, when all pertinent studies are considered together, the findings indeed indicate a significant role for the father.

Single women contemplating motherhood need to examine the real reasons they have been unable or unwilling to form and maintain healthy and stable relationships with those with whom they might ultimately have a child.

RICK GARTNER

Laguna Beach

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I really wish I could be present on the day that Linda Eisenberg explains to her son Seth why he should stick around to raise any children he might father. After all, as far as she is concerned, once they’ve donated the sperm, men are no longer necessary in the life of a child.

PEGGY HAUG

Torrance

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Let’s put the shoe on the other foot shall we? I bet we would never hear the end of it if men had the wombs and decided that women are expendable.

Why are so many women leaving men out of the equation? I for one, wish more men would become more conscious, more responsible and more accountable for their future progeny than to just go to a stall and sell their offspring to the highest bidder. That would put a serious end to this debate.

It is so unfortunate that so many people take for granted the responsibility of what it truly means to be a parent. I just can’t figure out why people (both men and women) don’t have reverence for why it takes two people to conceive a child. And what is this rubbish about attacking a patriarchal society? It is my observation that more and more we live in a society that caters to a matriarchal order and leaves men wondering: Where do we stand?

JOHN EGAN

Upland

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With respect to single mothers’ assessment that their fatherless children, conceived by sperm donation, doing “fine,” these ladies protest too much. Any boy who wants to buy a daddy from a daddy store does not share this complacent assessment.

Unmentioned in the self-congratulatory article is that fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of high school. Fatherless girls have twice the divorce rate and 2.6 times the unwed motherhood rate of their peers from intact families; fatherless boys have four times the crime rate. The factor that most determines a neighborhood’s crime rate is not its median income but its proportion of one-parent homes. But why let inconvenient facts interfere with one’s emotions and desires?

Elsewhere in the Aug. 3 issue of The Times, we read about a young father who states, “I never had a father. I never knew anyone who had a father. I never knew what fathers do.” As a society, we must expect more “deadbeat dads” to abandon their kids if we convince them that fathers are not needed.

MITCHELL KEITER

Los Angeles

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“And Baby Makes Two” says that one in three babies in the United States is born to an unwed woman and that, “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, of all the children born in 1993, 6.6 million were born to single women, up from 3.7 million in 1983 and only 243,000 in 1960.”

That is a most interesting set of statistics. If this is true, 6.3 million born to unwed mothers in 1993, about a third of all babies born in 1993, it means there were about 18.9 million total babies born in 1993.

If these figures are not a one-year oddity, it follows that with the years 1994, 1995, and 1996, the total count of babies born in the last four years would be somewhere around 78 million; about 26 million to unwed mothers. Given that fewer than 3 million people die a year, 12 million in the four years, it means a net population increase of about 66 million in the last four years, not counting immigration.

LAWRENCE BERG

San Gabriel