Lila Rose and law professor Helen Alvaré discuss how focusing on adults’ desires hurts children

A new Live Action video interview discusses the importance of family values, featuring Helen Alvaré, professor of law at George Mason University. In her conversation with Live Action founder and president Lila Rose, the two discussed Alvaré’s decades of pro-life work, feminism, marriage and sex, and much more. One part of their conversation focused on how children need both their parents, and how fatherlessness affects children.

Watch the full interview below:

Embracing Family Values | Exclusive Interview with Helen Alvare

“I was looking at a popular Instagram account recently, and it was of this lesbian couple, living married, and they have these two children,” Rose said. “And they talk openly how the donor — not the father, these children have no father to them, it’s a donor — they use the same donor, so the children look similar, and one of the mother’s eggs, and she carried the children. And they intentionally had one boy, one girl. And they publicize their whole life.”

Rose said that the comments were overwhelmingly positive, with people praising this family; she further noted that the parents said they don’t talk about the donor much. “And I just think about this boy they’re raising, that they intentionally brought into existence, who has a father,” she said. “They’re not acknowledging him as a father of any kind, he’s just a donor. And there’s zero father in his life, when all the data says fatherlessness is one of the leading causes — arguably the leading cause — of any number of social ills that a person can experience: criminality, addiction, mental health, economic opportunity. In every category, not having a father, especially like you said, as a boy, is devastating. So how did we get to the point where we’re accepting and even celebrating online these social experiments we’re performing on children?”

Alvaré said there are two things she believes are responsible.

“One, we’re a pretty materialist, individualist country,” she said, which she believes comes with both advantages and disadvantages, including that the constant emphasis on money and career has made the United States a less familial country. “Secondarily, I think that there’s always been a tendency… really, beginning in the ’60s, no-fault divorce was the beginning of that conversation writ large, about adults first. As long as the adults are happy, the children will be happy — which did not prove out.”

She continued by pointing out that concerns over fatherless children were ignored throughout the debates on no-fault divorce. “Down Browning, who is I think a sociologist and theologian in Chicago, used to say, we put adults at the front door, and then at the back door, we go, ‘OK, OK, the children aren’t doing so well, but here’s how we’re going to make it up to you.'”

Alvaré concluded that these essentially amount to recovery efforts, as opposed to setting up a strong foundation from the beginning.

The desire to have a child is understandable, and can be quite strong. But intentionally creating a child without a father or mother seems to put the adult’s desire over the ultimate well-being of the child. Far too often, the fertility industry has turned children into products to be bought and sold at the whims of the adults who want them. Children are no longer a privilege to be cherished; they are a right to which any adult is entitled — so long as they have the money to buy them, anyway. And for children conceived through reproductive technologies such as IVF, this reality is all too clear.

According to a Harvard Medical School study, 62% of children conceived through donor technologies, including surrogacy, believe it to be unethical and immoral, and said they felt like business transactions.

“Somehow, somewhere, my parents developed the idea that they deserved to have a baby, and it didn’t matter how much it cost, how many times it took, or how many died in the process,” one woman told the advocacy group Them Before Us. “They deserved a child. And with an attitude like that, by the time I was born they thought they deserved to have the perfect child… as Dad defined a perfect child. And since they deserved a child, I was their property to be controlled, not a person or a gift to be treasured.”

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