Women who banish fathers seen as heroines

Imagine there was a blanket ban on women earning a living, and a senior member of the Revenue Commissioners stood up at a public…

Imagine there was a blanket ban on women earning a living, and a senior member of the Revenue Commissioners stood up at a public policy conference and denounced women as immoral and irresponsible on account of their failure to pay income tax. The public response to such illogicality would be a predictable mixture of hilarity and dismissiveness.

And yet, when Prof Anthony Clare, at a recent conference examining alternatives to abortion, launched an attack on the character of men in general and unmarried fathers in particular, on the basis of the alleged uninvolvement of the latter in the lives of their children, the public response was a sanctimonious nodding of heads.

In the context of addressing the question of why women have abortions, Prof Clare delivered himself of the view that the "greatest failure" of 20th-century society was "a failure of men to involve themselves in the deepest and most personal issues of human life". He seemed to be saying that women have abortions because the fathers of their unborn children decline to support them.

This, as I attempted to explain after Prof Clare had departed, is a travesty of the truth. The reason some unmarried fathers are reluctant to involve themselves in the lives of their children is that unmarried fathers have negligible rights after their children are born, and none at all between conception and birth. In no other sphere of civilised activity are people expected to exercise responsibilities without basic human rights.

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Those fathers who, driven by a strong sense of moral responsibility, seek to go against the grain of society by insisting on participating in the lives of their children must throw themselves at the mercy of the whims of the mothers of those children - without rights, without guarantees, but with whatever responsibilities such mothers see fit to decree.

This highlights the fact that, although there is increasing debate about the issue of fathers' rights in itself, there is still no attempt to extend the logic of the discussion to a moral conclusion. Because the fundamentals of the argument about parental equality are ungainsayable, it is difficult not to acknowledge them when we zoom in on the narrower issue.

But when the lens widens to take in the broader picture of parenting in general, the old focus is resumed. There is much discussion about the need to "encourage" or "persuade" men to become more involved in the lives of their children, but no suggestion of extending equality to single fathers. Every time the broader issue of parenthood comes up, we continue to assume that the mother's pre-eminent position is still unambiguously appropriate, and accept the misandristic argument that male-non-involvement is purely the consequence of irresponsibility.

Such notions are now so much part of the culture that to outline other possibilities is to invite designation as a "misogynist". Since this appellation is almost invariably applied to the male of the species, men tend to be most careful about jostling the culture.

This explains why, at the above-mentioned conference, it was a woman, Ms Finola Bruton, who brought up the treatment of single fathers, and why Prof Clare chose to play to what he - wrongly, as it turned out - assumed to be the prejudices of the gallery.

I am being somewhat unfair to Prof Clare, who at least acknowledges that fathers are important. At another conference last week in London - on marginalised children in the context of divorce - he stressed that the welfare of children depends on their having relationships with both parents.

The fact that a leading psychiatrist is prepared to break with the dangerous consensus among childcare "experts" is an important development, but it would be even more significant if Prof Clare could straighten out his thinking with regard to the next logical phase of the argument. I can assure him that the key issue in the detachment of fathers from children is not lack of love or responsibility, but the fear men have of the powerlessness society seeks to force upon them.

Responsibility without rights equals terror. Prof Clare's position is that society has the right to berate men about their responsibilities despite refusing them basic human rights.

He is not alone. The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, in search of a cheap burst of applause in his address to the Labour party conference last week, also launched a minor attack on single fathers. "If you father a child," Mr Blair instructed unmarried fathers, "that child has something to do with you." Unsurprisingly, he got his applause. Memo to Tony Blair: I do not need you to tell me that my daughter - who, incidentally, is a citizen of the state over which you preside - has "something to do" with me. What I need from you is the extension of basic human rights to fathers like me, to enable us to carry out our responsibilities towards our children while retaining our dignity as human beings.

I, for my part, do not insist on these rights as a prerequisite of carrying out what I regard as my imperative moral responsibility to my daughter, but I do resent your rhetorical assumption that my willingness to do this is something the British state is entitled to claim as its right. Neither do I believe that, given your dereliction of your responsibility in this regard, you have the right to judge other men who have failed to equal my talent for self-abasement.

In the past week, we have again been reminded of the changing configuration of our societies in this regard. Ireland, according to figures published by the EU, has shown the most dramatic increase in the proportion of one-parent families since 1983. The highest proportion is still in Britain, where almost one quarter of families are single-parent families. The Irish figure is less than half of this, but is rising more rapidly. The absent parent is the father in 84 per cent of cases.

But once again, in discussing this issue, we have lapsed back into the standard analysis which presents unmarried mothers as heroic victims of a situation in which men evade responsibility. This is a grotesque distortion. Women are lone parents in 84 per cent of cases not because men abandon their children, but because we refuse to treat men and women as equal human beings.

In many cases of alleged abandonment by fathers in Ireland, the fathers have been constructively banished, with the collusion of the State, which encourages women to abuse the grotesque power we have conferred on them.

In a moral society, such mothers would be indicted for crimes against children and fathers. Here, they are feted as heroines and placed beyond the law. This situation will probably continue for as long as men of influence lack the gumption to stand on platforms and say things likely to make them unpopular with those whose misandristic thinking now governs so much of our affairs.