Children require extensive support and protection to meet their physical, emotional, and spiri­tual needs. They are uniquely de­pendent on their parents because they are particularly vulnerable. Often they are unable to speak on their own behalf or effectively de­fend themselves from various forms of exploitation.

Considerations like these pro­vide the basis for acknowledging the reality of “children’s rights.” Providing an appropriate family environment, with the presence of both a mother and a father, has long been recognized as one of the paramount examples of fulfilling children’s rights. A proper family environment offers essential safe­guards for a child, and helps assure the “full and harmonious develop­ment of his or her personality” — to borrow a phrase from the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Such “full and harmonious de­velopment,” however, is becoming more difficult to secure for many children in part due to a growing societal acceptance of powerful new assisted reproductive technologies that can isolate children and deprive them of critical parental and family supports during their childhood. Children brought into existence using anonymous donor sperm and artificial insemination, to consider one example, often struggle with a sense of violation as they end up spending years or even dec­ades searching for information about their biological father in the desperate hope of discovering his identity, meeting him in person, and learning more about their own roots and identity. Katy Faust, founder of the children’s rights organization Them Before Us, notes how children born from these techniques are “just like every other human child who longs to be known and loved by the two people responsible for their existence.”

Children entering the world through in vitro fertilization simi­larly struggle with their unnatural circumstances in which the hired services of a third-party contrac­tor, rather than their parents’ loving embrace, resulted in their coming-into-being. As they grow up in these situations, they may also face wrenching questions about how many other embryonic siblings were discarded, frozen or otherwise lost through the com­plex laboratory manipulations that created them. Surrogate mothering gives rise to yet an­other approach that can fracture a child’s sense of family connec­tion. This technique frequently relies on multiple parental figures: one who provides sperm, another eggs, and a third a womb for hire. An even greater number of pa­rental fig­ures can be involved in the produc­tion of so-called “three-parent embryos.”

While many of these assisted re­productive technologies chip away at the stabilizing presence of maternal and paternal figures in the life of a child, their growing use by same-sex couples to facilitate same-sex par­enting raises further serious concerns about harming children and ignoring their best interests. Nobody denies that two men might each be able to be a good father, but neither can be a mom. It is part of natural biological filiation for children to flourish under the loving care of their own mom and dad. No same-sex couple can provide that. As Katy Faust notes, 

“Until recently, our culture and laws have recognized that chil­dren have an innate right to their mother and father. When this right is violated, children become ‘items’ to be cut and pasted into any and every adult romantic relationship.”

Additional “cutting and pasting” in children’s lives occurs through the growing phenomenon of “triple-par­enting.” Because a same-sex couple (two lesbians for instance) cannot have a child unless someone provides the missing ingredient of donor sperm, they must rope in a male for the project — perhaps an anonymous sperm donor, or a friend who agrees to donate his sperm or an agreeable male friend willing to have sex with one of them. In any of these scenar­ios, a de facto relationship comes to exist between the same-sex couple and this third party individual, raising the prospect of triple-parenting. Cali­fornia was one of the first states that tried to pass a law allowing children to have three legal parents. In some cases the lesbians will entirely avoid interaction with any father/donor. In others, they will want their child to have an ongoing relationship with him. Some men may not care; others may be eager, and push to get in­volved with their biological kids. The growing acceptance of same-sex par­enting has created momentum for these kinds of triple-parenting situa­tions to arise, bringing additional complications into the lives of the children caught in the middle and subjecting them to further ambiguity regarding their own identity and their relationship to their parents.

Notwithstanding rapidly chang­ing social mores, a truly civilized so­ciety will never prioritize the desires of adults ahead of the innate rights of vulnerable children. As Jennifer Roback Morse, a tireless advocate of marriage and family concludes, 

“We are replacing the natural pre-political concept of biologi­cal parenthood with an artificial, government-created concept of parenthood that is entirely so­cially constructed… Triple-par­enting and genderless marriage are destructive policies. They must be stopped.”

Copyright © 2020, The National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, PA. All rights reserved.