WHEN she was five, Lorraine Moore's mother and father split up. Lorraine's mum had fallen in love with someone else – another woman. It was the late 1970s in working-class Wester Hailes in Edinburgh, not necessarily the kind of place where a lesbian
couple would have the easiest time bringing up two small children. Yet Lorraine has different memories. "It was a very positive experience," she recalls. "I didn't care whether I was being brought up by a six-foot green monster – as long as you are cared for and loved and made to feel secure then that's all that counts. That was the key thing in my childhood, for both my brother and me."
Nor did the hoary old belief about the children of gay parents themselves becoming gay turn out to be true. Lorraine and her brother, now in their thirties, are both in happy heterosexual relationships and have four children between them. And as for the lack of a father figure? It wasn't noticed, she says. "The point is, I do think you need good male role models, but it doesn't have to be a father, there all the time. We had my granddad about and lots of friends."
An all-women-run house actually had advantages, she recalls. "When my brother was a young teenager, he was much more confident about speaking to women."
Speaking to Lorraine, and listening to the affection with which she shares her childhood memories, it is hard to imagine it being a source of controversy. Calum Irving, of gay pressure group Stonewall Scotland, sums it up: "Being raised in a loving, caring home is more important than the gender of the parents."
This week the law looks set to catch up. A rule that currently requires fertility clinics to consider the "need for a father" when assessing a woman for treatment will be removed, and replaced with the more inclusive requirement for them to consider the need for "supportive parenting".
It is designed to ensure that couples like Lorraine's parents are not discriminated against if one of them wants to have a child through fertility treatment. Meanwhile, another law will be introduced so that the civil partners of women – rather than the biological father – who do manage to conceive have the right to be automatically viewed as the child's parent. Currently, they have to apply to adopt after the child is born.
Neither reform is likely to affect more than a few hundred gay couples across the country every year, and the rights of millions of fathers across the country will not be altered. But this week, the scrapping of the simple phrase "the need for a father" looks set to take on a symbolic value as part of a major soul-of-the-nation debate across the country. It will be part of the Government's bitterly contested Embryology Bill, which also proposes to legalise "hybrid embryos" made from both human and animal cells.
It comes at a time when many campaigners believe public recognition of fathers is being slowly eroded with every passing year. As such, the new plans look set to become a lightning rod for a new moral row. So does it simply not matter – as Lorraine claims – whether it's mum and dad, or mum and mum? Or is there something intrinsic about a dad that makes an upbringing richer?
Writing today in Scotland on Sunday, as he enters the moral maze for the first time since launching his campaign against Section 28, Stagecoach boss Brian Souter declares his customary strong views: "New evidence confirms that our social problems are being exacerbated because of the lack of good male role models and the absence of a father's influence." It is a view shared by people who might possibly agree with Souter on little else.
Louise Jamieson, 43, from Oxfordshire, was one of the very first people in Britain to be born through donor insemination. Her mother decided not to tell her the truth about her birth, and she only found out about the real identity of her father in her early thirties. She claims she had long suspected that something was up. "I never felt like I belonged. When I finally found out the identity of my father, it was the most extraordinary day of my life.
"He had died already, but just to have a name – I felt like a vacuum had been filled. It totally transformed my sense of personal identity and I felt I belonged on the planet. Everything made sense. I think, therefore, to say it doesn't matter is wrong."
Campaigners are now pointing to a welter of evidence which they claim backs up their case against the airbrushing of a biological father from some test-tube babies' birth certificates. Turning away from arguments based on tradition and religious belief, they – like Souter – argue that "father love" plays a crucial and distinct role in the successful upbringing of children. Researchers have gone as far as analysing the different ways fathers tend to hold their children compared with mothers. "Daddy holds" such as holding their children at arm's length, or tossing their child in the air or embracing them so that the child is looking over the father's shoulder "underscore a sense of freedom", claims the research.
Other work has declared that children with fathers in their lives have better exam results, and are less likely to get involved in crime or take drugs, than those without.
The simple sense of fear that teenagers might have about their father finding out that they were smoking pot is claimed as one reason why some choose to avoid it. And emotionally, too, the researchers claim, children with close bonds to a father turn out for the better. For example, boys, it is claimed, are less likely to be aggressive in later years if they have had a strong relationship with a father. Boys without fathers, say the researchers, partake in "protest masculinity" where they reject and denigrate all that is feminine and instead seek to prove their masculinity by engaging in domineering and violent behaviour.
What is more, boys also require the sense of identity and security a father supplies. In 1980, Harvard academic James Herzog introduced the concept of "father hunger" when he published research of 12 boys aged between 18 and 28 months whose fathers had left home and who subsequently experienced night terrors which involved threats of violence against them. The nightmares were a manifestation of the sense of vulnerability caused by the lack of a father figure, he claimed. Meanwhile, for girls, the same pro-family researchers argue that a close father-daughter bond has a strong link to low incidences of teenage pregnancy.
As for the claim that the current laws discriminate against lesbians, opponents dismiss it. "There are no examples which have been recorded of any lesbian couple or single parents who have been refused treatment because of their situation," claims Allan Murray of Passion for Life, an organisation set up to lobby against the reforms this week. Not so, claims Stonewall. Recently, they claim, a lesbian couple in Birmingham were turned away because the hospital's eligibility criteria included the need for a "stable heterosexual relationship". Perhaps more troubling, the group says that because of the restrictions lesbian couples are forced to pay up to £2,000 to source sperm from questionable sources – including one reputed case where a delivery turned up in a coffee flask.
Irving adds: "The changes to fertility law simply reflect the 21st-century reality that same-sex couples in committed relationships already raise children in loving, stable homes. This bill would secure equality for lesbian couples receiving publicly funded IVF treatment. We do not believe this should be a matter for a free vote – equality should not be a so-called 'conscience' matter but a basic human right. At the moment many couples are forced to put their health at risk using informal donation methods because they have been turned away by fertility clinics."
Gay rights campaigners add that the plan to automatically allow the partners of lesbian women having a baby to be placed on a birth certificate merely brings the law into line with already enacted legislation on civil partnerships. They point to some cases where the natural mother has died and where families have taken a child away from the deceased's civil partner, taking advantage of the lack of clarity about the partner's legal status.
The matter is now in the hands of MPs. The decision to remove fathers from fertility law was taken by the House of Lords, but some MPs will this week seek to get dads back in. Tory MP Andrew Lansley will place an amendment suggesting that the clause refers to "supportive parenting and a father or male role model". Another amendment specifies that fertility clinics should look at whether there is "a mother and father". With MPs given a free vote, no one is sure exactly who will win.
Women such as Lorraine Moore will tell anyone that not having a dad around the place did her no harm whatsoever. Scrapping the word "father" from the law is unlikely to really change whether children end up with one or are denied one. But this week is about much more than dry legislative clauses. It is about the tolerance and morality of the state of the nation. Who wears the trousers in modern-day Britain? After this week, we might know a little more.
Dad's the word: advice from the old man"Putting myself forward for leadership, I come back again and again to what I learned as I grew up – my father's belief, his fundamental optimism."
Gordon Brown, Prime Minister"One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters."
George Herbert, poet"Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands, / Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands, / There the great city stands."
Walt Whitman, American poet"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."
Anne Sexton, American poet"All over the world, perhaps mostly in the West, young people are finding that they'd rather go barefoot than wear Daddy's shoes."
Alan Jackson, Scottish poet"My father was frightened of his father, I was frightened of my father and I'm damned well going to see to it my children are frightened of me."
King George V"To her the name of father was another name for love."
Fanny Fern, American novelist"Fathers should neither be seen nor heard."
Oscar Wilde, poet and playwright"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection."
Sigmund Freud"I didn't know the full facts of life until I was 17. My father never talked about his work."
Martin Freud, son of Sigmund Freud"To be a successful father… there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years."
Ernest HemingwayThe full article contains 1864 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
