Reader Dilemma: 'I’m a married gay woman and want to adopt but I'm told it is cruel to raise a father-less child

'I feel we can offer so much love to a child that they would never feel there was something missing from their life'

'Good parenting starts even before conception' (Rex Features)

Dear Virginia

I’m a married gay woman and both of us are longing to start a family. We have begun to investigate donor sperm and are really excited. But my best friend says it’s cruel to bring up a child without a father. She was adopted and formed a bond with her birth father as an adult. I feel we can offer so much love to a child that they would never feel there was something missing from their life, and we have plenty of male relatives and friends around. But I confess she has made me doubt. What do you think?

Yours sincerely, Wendy

Virginia says...

I believe that it’s really important, if you are going to have a child, to give it the best possible chance in life, even before it’s born. That means that, ideally, you give it a birth mother and a birth father who’ll stick around, you don’t drink or smoke too much while you’re pregnant, you eat properly and you don’t travel into the jungle on the day you’re about to give birth.

In fact, good parenting starts even before conception. And I think that just by writing to me, you’re aware that with your donor plans, there might be something missing from the child you want to bring into the world.

I’m not saying there aren’t masses of children with same-sex parents, or born using donor sperm, who don’t have fantastic childhoods. But this isn’t about sex. The disadvantage isn’t really about not having a father. It’s about the child having absolutely no clue about the background of one parent. Your friend has opened up a real dilemma. She obviously found the lack of one real parent, genetically connected, a problem, or she wouldn’t have mentioned it to you – even though she may have had a perfectly delightful adoptive father. Because let’s say your baby, conceived with the aid of an unknown father, mainly inherits his genetic characteristics and not yours? Like your friend, it will grow up feeling out of place, however loved it is.

Your partner/wife can’t, sadly, provide the genes. So would it be possible, perhaps, to get inseminated by some close male member of her family rather than a stranger? At least the child would then have something genetic in common with both your partner’s family and yours. Or why not be inseminated by a male friend who’d agree to play a parental role, who’d love the child and visit frequently? Then your child would have one dad and two mums – what a bonus!

Or, why not adopt? That would, it seems to me, to be far more sensible. You would be loving a child who had already been brought into the world and who has absolutely nothing. This way, you wouldn’t be creating a little person burdened by the absence of a genetic connection to one parent. You would be helping a child who was already disadvantaged.

You say you would bring it up with masses of male role models, but there’ll be neither the genetic connections nor the unconditional, all-consuming parental love of a single male in its life.

As with most parents (me included), your desire to have a child is basically selfish – to have someone to love. But listen to your friend – who was presumably loved when she was young – and wonder whether real love can ever include deliberately burdening your child with an empty space when it comes to knowing anything about half of where it came from, if there’s any chance of doing something different.

Readers say...

A child just needs love

Your friend is, simply, wrong. She may base this opinion on her own experience, but that doesn’t mean that the same will apply in every other case. I was brought up by a single mother and the only regret I have is that she never had a loving partner to help her with the difficult job of raising a child. There were plenty of male role models around, if you wish to call them that, but if I’m allowed to be frank, most of them were useless. The only thing that a child needs is to feel loved and secure, and if there are two people at home to provide that, then all well and good. Gender does not come into it.

Harvey Brown, Beverley, Yorkshire

Find your child a father

You cannot underestimate the need for a child to know where they come from, even if they have no daily contact with their parent. I had my son after a brief affair and was determined to build a strong, if far-flung, relationship with his father. We visited each year, so my son was familiar with that part of his background and he has always known that he has a father who loves him. I would advise you to find a close gay (or straight) man friend who would love to be a father. This would mean possibly sharing some of the parenting and going into the legal implications, but the child would have the love of their biological father. Imagine your own reaction if you discovered that your father was a sperm donor.

Gudrun Hansen , Shoreham-by-Sea

It’s security that really matters

In a heterosexual marriage, family therapists might argue that fathers help children “cross the bridge” from dependence to independence. But I can hear mature single mothers crying out: “Well, my children have turned out OK.” Quite.

There’s an old saying: let not the best be the enemy of the good. Attachment theory points out that what really counts to a child growing up is to have a prime carer, even if that adult is not blood relation.

There are only two things I would ask. Are you both over 25 (marriages of under-25s have a higher failure rate)? Secondly, many intelligent adults are unable to distinguish between love and lust. So has the relationship lasted at least two years or more (relationships based on sex rarely last more than about 18 months)? If yes, then you should be able to provide a loving, stable family home. And that’s what counts.

Rob, Basingstoke

Next week's dilemma

For the past six months, I’ve been going out with a divorced man and we love each other very much. The problem is that he seems obsessed with his children. He wants us to move in together, but that means having them over every weekend and I don’t know that I could stand it. I quite understand that he loves them, but they seem to be the number one priority in his life, and my concerns always come last. Surely they should learn that they won’t be treated like princes and princesses in later life, and learn to fit in with other people?

Yours sincerely, Maggie

What would you advise Maggie to do?

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