On Singles Having Planned, High-Tech Babies

Recently I received an email about a Christian unmarried woman considering the use of donor sperm to conceive a baby. Another woman who heard about it suggested a solution: the church should hunt down a man for the unmarried woman to marry.

Um, no.

This advice, though well-intentioned, is misguided because it suggests a misunderstanding of the purpose of both marriage and the Church. The main purpose of marriage is not procreation. It’s oneness. Certainly procreation was part of God’s beautiful design for marriage, but it’s not the main thing. The same is true of the Church—its purpose is certainly not to serve as a find-a-mate service. (Believe me, that has been tried.)

We need to look deeper for our response.

Proverbs 30:16 lays out some natural laws, and among four things it says are “never satisfied” is a “barren womb.” God has created most women with a deep longing to marry and bear children. And this unsatisfied longing can break their hearts. For most women, even those with great careers, the job of “mommy” is their number-one aspiration. The inability to accomplish that desire could see a correspondence in a man being unemployed and unable to work for the rest of his life, even if he is healthy. One can learn to trust God to ease the pain, but the devastation is still a daily, lifelong hurt. Ever since Genesis 3, life on this planet has been filled with brokenness, and the longing described by the woman desiring to have a baby is one of many evidences of holy longings. The best response is for those around her to grieve with her.

She does have several possible ways of meeting the desire to parent, however. The first is to adopt a child who needs a mother. Certainly such an arrangement is “unideal.” But it’s unlike conceiving a child into a one-parent situation in that it’s  taking an existing child from a zero-parent situation to a one-parent situation. The former is creating an unideal  situation; the latter is improving an existing situation. I went to college with a guy whose single mom was a missionary in South America and adopted him and his siblings when they were parentless. Amazingly enough, they had no ethical dilemma about what she did.

Still, if this woman adopts, everyone involved must understand something: This probably will not satisfy her longing to bear a child. Experiencing a child in one’s womb and giving birth—these are rites of womanhood to most women. So even if this woman does adopt, she needs to be allowed the grief evoked by not knowing what it’s like to look into the eyes of her own biological child. This is not being “stuck on genetics.” This is a longing that falls in line with the natural order of things—how God made us to work. The Church’s appropriate response is to weep with those who weep.

Single parenting is very, very hard, but better for a parentless child to have at least one parent than none. Another possibility is for this woman to change careers so she is intimately involved in children’s lives. Add to that volunteering to teach kids in church or as part of Big Sister program. But again, everyone must understand this will not satisfy the longing to have a child. It is only a healthy channel for investing in the next generation. Every kid on the planet could benefit from receiving more love. The most important ethical consideration, in my mind, for the woman seeking donor insemination—and the ethical reason why I would counsel against it—is the injustice to her potential child.

The Creator’s beautiful ideal is for every child to be conceived by two people, a mother and father, who are married to and love each other. In the mystery of male/female interaction, the child learns something about the image of God embodied in a father and the image of God embodied in a mother. The woman in the scenario described is setting out intentionally to bring a child into an un-ideal situation. And instead she needs to think about how it would feel to be that child.

If the woman desiring to be a mom proceeds regardless of this concern, she needs to know that the child also has a right to know who his or her parents are. Kids born to donor-insemination arrangements where the donor remains anonymous are now growing up and expressing their outrage. Many of them feel their parents considered only their own pain and not their children’s needs. So if this Christ-following woman feels she must proceed, she needs to choose a donor bank where the donor is identified. Her child needs to know her genetic heritage, and not just facts on paper. He or she will want to meet and interact with the sperm donor. And that is a healthy desire that should be met…which opens a big, huge, squirming can of worms.

As mentioned, I do not think a solution is for the church to hunt down a man. In 1 Corinthians 7 we read Paul’s epistle to church in a sex-crazed culture like our own, and in it he encourages his readers to consider staying single for sake of the Kingdom. The church in past ages has first overemphasized staying single and then swung the pendulum by overemphasizing married/family life. That’s where we are today. Instead, the church needs to help this woman find contentment in her broken-hearted state of singleness without children. (And not by offering trite sayings, platitudes, and just-trust-God criticism.) She will live with a holy longing all her life unless God brings her the right man.

Though she does not have a husband, the family of Christ is the ideal place for her to find that she does have fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and yes—children. And as a reminder, God is still in the miracle-working business. So her spiritual family should also offer their fervent prayers for and with her that sooner than later she will find a man with whom to share an enduring, God-honoring love.