Neither Ms. Hope nor Mr. Williams is interested in a romantic liaison. But they both want a child, and they’re in serious discussions about having, and raising, one together. Never mind that Mr. Williams is gay and that the two did not know of each other’s existence until last October, when they met on Modamily.com, a Web site for people looking to share parenting arrangements.Yes, there is a certain logic to it. Maybe it would work in a Stone Age hunter-gatherer village. But all civilizations have used family units with a romantically involved mom and dad. There is a reason for that -- all of the alternatives have failed.
Mr. Williams and Ms. Hope are among a new breed of online daters, looking not for love but rather a partner with whom to build a decidedly non-nuclear family. And several social networks, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, and MyAlternativeFamily.com, as well as Modamily, have sprung up over the past few years to help them. ...
They first met in person on Thanksgiving 2011. “I felt like this guy was my relative or long-lost brother, but then again he was also a stranger,” Ms. Pieke said. They continued the dialogue: reading each other’s medical charts, undergoing fertility tests. He moved into a separate bedroom in her home, and, she said, four weeks later, “He handed me a semen sample, we hugged, and I went into my bedroom and inseminated myself.” ...
They first met in person on Thanksgiving 2011. “I felt like this guy was my relative or long-lost brother, but then again he was also a stranger,” Ms. Pieke said. They continued the dialogue: reading each other’s medical charts, undergoing fertility tests. He moved into a separate bedroom in her home, and, she said, four weeks later, “He handed me a semen sample, we hugged, and I went into my bedroom and inseminated myself.” ...
Mr. Weil believes this type of parenting arrangement is completely logical.
“When you think about the concept of the village, and how the village was part of child rearing for so many cultures for so many thousands of years, it makes total sense,” he said. “The idea that two people — let alone one person — would do it without the village is really nutty.”
My libertarian impulses say that people should be able to make whatever contracts they want for their nonstandard arrangements. They seem committed to their kids, so why not let them pursue their goofy plans? Because the law makes it impossible:
But even a legal document is not necessarily binding. “Courts will operate on the basis of what is in the best interest of the child,” said Bill Singer, a lawyer in Belle Mead, N.J., who specializes in nontraditional families. “Although a judge might look at an agreement to see what the intention of the parties was, it is not controlling.”So it is impossible under American law to make a binding coparenting contract. The parents will always be subject to a judge tearing it up and forcing them into a completely different arrangement.
There is no chance of states passing a law favoring coparenting contracts either. That is because our legislatures are dominated by anti-libertarian feminists, liberals, LGBTQIA sympathizers, and other statists. So this is just another trend furthering the destruction of the family.
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“When you think about the concept of the village, and how the village was part of child rearing for so many cultures for so many thousands of years, it makes total sense,” he said. “The idea that two people — let alone one person — would do it without the village is really nutty.”
Mr. Williams is saying that the responsibility of raising the kids belongs to the entire society rather than just to the people who choose to have them. My response to him would be if I, as a tax payer, should be required to some extent to foot the bill for raising other peoples' kids, I should have some input into deciding who should or should not be allowed to have kids.
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