Hey, she just wrote insemination – that’s how it all happens!
I meant to specify that it sounds like she’d like it to be standard pick-a-dad-in-a-book (versus asking, say, a gay male friend to donate for insemination).
It’s not about which parent is better, but which scenario is less distressing to the child. I believe the vast majority of children would rather know than not know, regardless of what the truth is.
Neither is as bad as, “I decided you didn’t deserve a daddy.”
Because the “father” is most likely a broke college student who jerked off into a small plastic cup in exchange for money. He’s just a profile in a catalogue indentified by number. He is not a parent, he’s a sperm donor. He has no rights or obligations toward the child whatsover. Not legally, not morally, nothing.
The OP very clearly said she was planning on using artificial insemination in the OP. Why do people keep assuming there’s a man involved that she’s cutting off contact with.
Former single mother checking in. I didn’t ever want to be a single mother but after I managed to screw up my contraception I made the choice to make the best of it. My daughter certainly is a better reward than I deserve for being unable to follow simple instructions.
There’s plenty of wonderful times and motherhood is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. She was a good infant and I didn’t have much of the sleep deprivation that people assume comes with a newborn. I thought it would all be a lot harder than it was.
The most difficult times have been when we’re sick. When I’m sick, down with the achy, spewing, coughing, let-me-curl-up-and-die flu, I still have to change nappies and feed us both and provide what entertainment I can. I’ve been fortunate that my parents have helped me out during the worst of those times. The other problem is when she’s sick and daycare won’t take her… if there were two parents, we could take it in turns to use our sick leave to take care of her but there’s just me, and at times work has been very annoyed with me for the number of sick days I’ve had with her. Daycare screwed me over on this a bit when she was quite small. For a while, they would call and tell me to take her home if she had a runny nose. She always had a runny nose! For her first year of daycare, she was sick every two weeks without fail as it was, and sending her home for runny noses just ate up my sick leave and burned up the goodwill of my mother as an alternate carer. Thankfully they’ve stopped doing that, but work still see me as flaky for all that sick time I had to use in her first year of life.
Because there is.
No, there isn’t. There’s a random stranger who was never in contact with or met the mother to begin with.
Is it not possible to adopt a child as a single parent?
And who is the child’s father.
You’re dead wrong on this one.
I have first-hand experience on this - I got pregnant at 18, and was abandoned at 4 months along.
It is literally the best thing that could have happened. He wasn’t abusive or even jerky, he was just not someone who I would want to have been with. When my daughter was about 6 months old, I met my future husband. After a couple of years of friendship, we moved in together with my daughter at age three. We’ve been together ever since, and have been together for 13 years, married for 7.
Having some marginal guy, who was totally blah, popping in and out of our lives, with my daughter having to deal with this guy…it would have been terribly disruptive to our relationship with my husband, and added nothing to her life.
She was adopted by my husband when she was 9, and her birth certificate bears his name as the Father. And he is, in every way. She knows about her biological father, and hasn’t really expressed much interest in him. And she says now, at age 14, which is a really bad, awkward, low self-esteem age, “who cares - I have a dad” 
Having “some guy” (which is what he is) hanging around would have done nothing but impair that relationship, which would have been a tragedy.
It’s not for the mother to preemtively decide that a child should not have a father at all. with no regard to the father’s actual character. Adapting to circumstances is one thing. Intentionally creating the circumstances quite another.
Yes, all of us who chose to raise children alone instead of with the useless men who happened to have fathered them are horrible people. We get it. Don’t you have some kids you should be hanging with, instead of chastising us?
Actually, I reckon that it’s good to hear those voices of dissent - even the ones that are expressed in more extreme ways. You are creating another human being; unless you have your finger on the big red button o’ doom, there’s no single bigger decision you could make.
I really like your second paragraph.
FWIW, I am another kinda single mother by choice, in that I chose to remain pregnant and he chose not to remain in my daughter’s life.
One thing my daughter always missed was having the second set of extended family - cousins, etc. My ex provided a good extended family for her, but we broke up, and my own family has turned out to be even more messed up than I thought - even the couple I thought were OK turn out to be, well, not.
Now it’s is just me and my daughter. My will places her in the care of my ex-GF, but if my ex should die with me? She’d have no place to go at all. That’s a horrifying thought.
Bear in mind that this is much more likely to happen if you don’t have an extra parent’s extended family to count on.
Anyway … My daughter has also mentioned wanting a Dad (as a Dad rather than an extra family member), but not as much when my partner was around and even then not that much.
From my experience, ISTM that wanting a Dad can a) not occur at all; b) be a big problem or c) occur only at a couple of key stages
a) TBH, I’ve been surprised at the number of people I’ve met who genuinely weren’t bothered about their biological father’s identity. I kinda thought it was something everyone would want to know, but apparently that’s not the case.
b) There have been two people (adults) that I’ve known who’ve had issues with not knowing who their father was; with one it was because it was tied up with the a whole mess of other messed-up stuff, with the other it was kinda a big deal despite her having a happy childhood.
c) With the others it was generally about seeking your own identity and the general internal melodrama of growing up.
Donor ID release is a good idea at least, IMO.
Diogenes, I don’t think you fully understand the set of options here.
I’m almost 30 and in grad school. I would like to have children. I’d make a great mother and I like kids. I’m also one of two people in my family under the age of 45. If I don’t have my own family, it’s likely that relatively soon I will have no family at all. The idea of spending every Christmas alone for decades is not appealing at all. I want a lively house full of love and joy, and I am confident that I can provide that.
If I only commit to having children in an ideal relationship, there is a HUGE risk that it will not happen. Let’s say it takes me a year of dating to find a guy who has similar ideas as me and likes me- it’s an ambitious plan. People spend decades looking for a mate. But we’ll say I lower my standards and decide to settle with the first person I think I can reasonably live with- which is not only depressing, but is a recipe for failure. We’ll say I’m committed to making it work anyway.
Give it another year to date and get the marriage proposal. Meanwhile, I’m hoping like hell nothing goes wrong and there are no surprises, because a mess-up in the relationship that far along would mean I’d likely never have a family.
I’d imagine hubby will not be rearing to pop out a kid immediately, and I will probably need a year out of grad school to get a steady job and a permanent place to live.
Now I’m 33. I’ve got two good years to have a kid. That’s iffy. That’s not a lot of room for error. And, as we all know from looking at the world around us even briefly, the world of relationships is full of chances for error. The chances of everything going according to that neat little plan are almost nil, and unfortunately there is not a ton of wiggle room. I just don’t feel like I can count on that. And I’m not ready to stake my family- which will be the most important thing in my life- on it.
I have a back-up plan. It’s not my plan A, but it is a plan.
Yeah, I don’t see any reason to not let a child know who their father is, unless he’s Charles Manson.
But I decided that both my daughter and I were better off without her father, and it was absolutely and unequivocally the right decision for everyone involved. I’m happier, she’s happier, and he’s… well, he’s Jim, but there’s nothing to be done about it.
I never said any of this.
I never said anything about needing to be in a relationship. My issue is with deciding a priori that a kid will only be entitled to one parent, not because of any failing on the part of the other parent, but because one individual just decides it would be really fun to be the sole owner of a baby. There’s a sexist entitlement there that bugs me, an that isn’t in the best interest of the child.
By the way, my wife had our youngest kid at 40 with no complications at all. You have more than 2 years left.
Do you really, honestly, seriously believe anyone decides to have a child on their own “just for fun?” Do you think the women doing this don’t dream they had a partner to share their lives with?
I imagine the vast majority of single women choosing to have babies on their own via artificial insemination are women who worked a bit too hard on the “financially stable” part and realized their years of peak fertility were likely to end before they were going to find someone they could settle down with (or even envisions as part of their life as a non-custodial parent.) Speaking of which, have you ever tried being a woman in the dating pool past her mid-thirties? Slim pickings. You can’t just go out, bat your eyes, and find a decent guy that you trust. I’m just hitting the “people I know are getting married” age, and I’m realizing that if I don’t make it work my options are going to be to marry someone nobody else would, or to wait for divorces (too long to have kids!)
I don’t say this often, but it’s different for women. You guys have time. You can find a younger woman. Hell, if things look really bad, you can find a mail-order bride whenever. You can quite possibly never be in a situation where you can’t change your mind and have a family.
I’m glad your wife beat the odds, but at 40 you are looking at a less than 64% chance of getting pregnant. If you have your heart set on a family, that’s a 36% chance of never reaching one of your life goals- one that you likely could have easily reached just a few years earlier.
It’s a crappy situation. If I had my wish, women would have the same reproductive options in later life as men. With modern health care and lifespans, I think it’d work out fine. But we don’t have that. So we find imperfect solutions that may not be ideal, but don’t ruin what is likely a perfectly good parent’s ability to have a family.
I think the only sexist attitude here is that women decide to have babies on their own for the purpose of having a baby all to themselves and depriving some guy of the joys of fatherhood, rather than because they really want to be a parent, and a suitable parenting partner hasn’t appeared.
Bully for you and your wife, never to have faced the issue of infertility. Alternatively the OP (and Even Sven) could be more like my friend who would be a fantastic mother, if only she hadn’t met the man she wanted to have kids with at 36, and found out at the same time that her ovarian reserves are too low for her to have a child herself.
Because he donated the sperm, as opposed to being an unadvertent sperm donor.