‘Single Mothers by Choice’ Behaving Badly (Part II)

Background: A few weeks ago I debated the issue of “Single Motherhood by Choice” on the BBC. The producer emailed the guests the 2006 London Times article Focus: Going solo (6/4/06), and among those I was debating was Viki Matten, who is discussed in the piece as an early pioneer in the “Single Motherhood by Choice” movement. A poll of 5,000 women conducted for That”s Life! magazine in the United Kingdom found that 42% of women say they would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, regardless of the wishes of their partners. Reading this article, I can believe it.
In this blog post and in Part I, I’m pointing out some of the bad behavior of some of the women in the article. A couple examples: 1) “[Men] are often handed a maintenance bill for a child they didn”t know they were going to have. One woman, who admitted to pursuing a man purely for his sperm and now receives a £346.50 monthly ‘bonus’ from him, says: ‘It means he can”t get a mortgage, but I don”t care, he wasn”t very nice to me — if he”d behaved better I might have let him stick around.'” 2) “According to Lucy Beresford, a psychotherapist at the Priory hospital in Roehampton, southwest London, more and more women are resorting to sometimes dubious tactics to achieve motherhood. “‘You could call them ‘sperm catchers”,’ she said. ‘This is being driven by career women in their mid-to-late thirties who find that having a baby is rising to the top of their ‘to do” list. It is happening increasingly. If they haven”t a partner, they”ve got the basic kit and they decide to go it alone’… “‘Sperm donation is messy and legally fraught,’ said a 34-year-old advertising executive who is privy to such discussions. ‘They”ve changed the law so that the donor can potentially come back to haunt you. Adoption takes for ever. The old-fashioned option — a one-night stand, is the least complicated way of getting pregnant. It”s quick, you get to view a prototype and it”s free’… “One woman, who did not want to be named, said she found that 21st century metro-man is now frustratingly aware of ‘shared responsibility’ when it comes to sexual encounters, and her attempts at impregnation became farcical as she attempted to find a man who would mate au naturel.”