In an age of bio-miracles, storks and gooseberry bushes are back in fashion. Telling children the truth about their birth is out. To the dismay of obfuscators, Melanie Johnson, the Public Health Minister, has announced that the anonymity granted to egg and sperm donors is to be waived, giving future generations the right to know who their genetic parents are.
Worse, Suzi Leather, head of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, wants the law changed so that single and lesbian women have the same rights to IVF treatment as heterosexual couples. The Christian Right, and fathers' lobbyists, are enraged and perplexed by an apparent contradiction. Either men are so vital that they must expect 18-year-old strangers turning up on their doorsteps demanding love and hand-outs on the basis of a syringe of borrowed gametes. Or, conversely, fathers are redundant to family life.
But where's the conflict? If single women and same-sex couples are entitled to adopt, it is unfair to debar them from having children who, in most cases, will be supplied with male role models. Legal sanction would also allow such women access to registered donors, rather than using the internet to produce e-babies never able to trace their genesis.
Identity is not a luxury for New Age root-seekers engaged in a sort of genealogical feng shui . Searching for origins is not emotional decluttering, or idle curiosity, or even a question of utilitarian detail, such as whether there is a history of breast cancer in the family. Paternity defines, more precisely than we care to think, who people are. General intelligence and looks are heritable, obviously, but so are personality traits, such as being conscientious or neurotic. Whether you are likely to be a chain-smoker or an alcoholic, or watch too much television, or get divorced are all, to some degree, bred in the bone.
Despite the fascination with the human genome, any hint of biological determinism is scary. Heritability, heavy with the curse of the inalterable and the whiff of eugenics, is far less comfortable than blind faith in social conditioning. And so the ambitious parent is encouraged to play Mozart to babies in the womb, shield children from PlayStations and Barbies, and read them improving Dickens novels before they can tie their shoelaces.
Add in sledgehammer doses of 'father time', up from 15 minutes a day 30 years ago to three hours. Then, having calibrated the ingredients and set the timer, wait for perfect results.
But raising children is not like making jam. Assiduous parents cannot turn out paragons to order, any more than the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World could, in reality, have used drugs, food and brain-washing to establish the divisions between alphas and epsilons.
Despite the case made by post-Darwinians such as Matt Ridley for a sensible balance between nature and nurture, the illogical view prevails that producing the right sort of children demands a specific family make-up. The corollary, cruel and nonsensical, is that non-nuclear families ordain the wrong type of child. Everyone can agree that fathers' presence is good for children and acknowledge that a general dearth of responsible males has grievous social consequences. There should be consensus, too, about the terrible deal for estranged men. Of the 150,000 children involved annually in divorce, 40 per cent lose touch with the non-resident parent, generally the father, within two years of separation.
None of that alters the fact that same sex-couples, single mothers, grandparents, lone fathers and other carers all bring up well-balanced children who may even have benefited by escaping the tyranny of more conventional set-ups. What are parents for? Many think, presumptuously, that their purpose is to mould the infant variant of Rousseau's noble savage into the ideal child, by way of Freud, Spock and the Boden clothing catalogue. As Steven Pinker argues, in The Blank Slate, children are actually much more influenced by their peers. Over-rating parents' power leads to a second danger. The realm of the omnipotent adult pays much lip service, but little real account, to children's rights. No wonder that a moral lobby which thinks it proper for the very young to be beaten by their parents and locked up by the state, scorns some children's need to explore their own origins.
The new, non-retrospective law will not come into play for two decades. In the meantime, many children will suspect and worry that a parent may not be their 'real' father. Fewer than one in 10 is ever told the truth.
If adults feel no anxiety about such omissions, it may be that they are blinded by the myth of altruism. How selfish for lesbian women to want a baby, some parents complain. How monstrous that single women should think it their right to bear a child. But almost no one has babies for the greater good, such as boosting the dwindling population. It would be spooky if they did. Once, children were cheap labour or inheritors of a trade. Now, however beloved, they are also a lifestyle choice, or a companion to an older sibling, or a prop for a sagging relationship. One colleague had a baby because she hated her boss and gauged that he would have moved on by the time her maternity leave expired.
Unsurprisingly, those sperm donors motivated by impulses other than funding a vindaloo supper and a pack of Marlboro do seem unselfishly glad to have helped create human life. Despite warnings that no man will risk being stalked by incidental progeny, the number of Swedish sperm donors dipped when anonymity was scrapped, but then recovered. Only the profile has varied, with more older men and fewer students.
In tandem with the latest furore runs a greater scandal of identity. The discredited evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow means that 258 cases of women convicted of killing their babies will be reassessed. A further 3,000 children may have had their cases influenced by Meadow's theory of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and been taken from parents accused, rightly or wrongly, of harming them.
Most of those children have been fostered or adopted. To disrupt their lives, after many years, would be terrible. But almost more heartbreaking is the plight of innocent mothers who stand condemned to remain forever unknown to their children or, worse, branded as predators who tried to kill them. There remains only one, barely satisfactory, redress. Even when guiltless families cannot be reunited, some contact should be forged when the child is old and well informed enough to wish for it.
The state, despite some excellent, and under-funded, front-line workers, has once again been proved an appalling meddler in children's lives. In that, it takes its cue from individuals who do not see, or care, that the pious mantra of observing the child's best interests too often means reinforcing adult autocracy. The rows over sperm donors and what action to take on those wrongly severed from blood families offer similar lessons.
Children have rarely been more fretted over, or more ignored. If we are serious about their rights, the least we can do is tell them who they are.
