Homeschool, anyone?
I think this is an excellent reason to homeschool. Of course, being homeschoolers, I have a million and one reasons for choosing this route. My kids are progressing at their own pace, they are beautifully ignorant of anything sexual at the moment and are developing a deep love for God. I pray there are many more like them out there!
Phase 1 - began with the typical couple who could not have children. They opted for IVF rather than adopt. Over the span of several years, eggs were harvested from the wife and combined with sperm from the husband but no fertilization took place.
Phase 2 - introduced three new donors - eggs harvested from another woman, sperm from another man and a surrogate to carry the fertilized ovum to term. One month before the birth of the child, the husband filed for a divorce stating that he wanted nothing to do with the child. At her birth, the father was listed as unknown and the mother as the woman who originally contracted for this child.
Phase 3 - the "mother" has filed papers seeking child support from her ex-husband. He has no biological or legal connection to the child and the courts agree that he has no financial obligation to the child. In fact, the courts have also determined that the "mother" is only a legal guardian and given her the right to adopt the child as a single parent.
Phase 4 - the surrogate who carried the child for 9 months, has returned to the picture, accusing the "mother" of lies and offering to adopt the child if the "mother" chooses not to. The "mother" refuses to adopt because that would negate her legal claim to child support. Essentially, this child has no legal parents!
The little girl is about 4 years old. Neither her egg nor sperm donors feel any connection to her. She is totally dependent upon her legal guardian for her emotional well being. At this young age, she is not cognizant of the processes that resulted in her birth. That will change when she reaches the teen years and begins to ask questions. I vividly recall a segment on GMA several years ago where a young teenaged girl set out to find her sperm donor "father". It is perfectly normal and natural for all of us to want to know from whom we inherited our nose, eyes, etc. More importantly, we also need to know if we inherited any medical conditions, some of which sit resident in our bodies, like ticking time bombs. GMA arranged for her and her mom to come on the program and they had a camera crew at the home of her sperm donor father. He came on the monitor, accompanied by his wife and 2 young boys. The young girl's face glowed with the excitement of finally meeting her "father" - she even called him "dad". The girl asked several questions and blushed when she discovered that she had inherited her big feet from her "dad". It was now the GMA host's turn to ask questions. "Do you know how many children you have fathered"?, she inquired. The man proudly elevated his shoulders as he announced: "From what I understand, 1,000 children, and I hope they don't all come looking for me." That brought a laugh from the GMA host. The sweet expression on that young girl's face immediately melted. Her shoulders fell as she cast her gaze down to the carpeted floor in the GMA studio, as she realized that she was no more special in her "dad's" eyes.
There was another scientific breakthrough several years back when scientists in England began harvesting unfertilized eggs from aborted fetuses. Mercifully, psychologists determined that while these would resolve one aspect of infertility for women who could not conceive, society was not yet ready to emotionally grapple with children whose mothers had never been born.
As an adoptee and adoptive parent, I personally know how emotionally vital it is for young adults to identify with their biological heritage. At the doctor's office, we are often asked if there is a history of such and such in our family, to which only 1/2 or no response may be given. When one steps out of God's plan for natural reproduction, we enter a world filled with unknowns.
Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae was truly prophetic.
Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good," it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (18)—in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.
HUMANAE VITAE
Thanks to the advances of modern science, somewhere in the US this morning, a young child is waking up to a new day - with no parents. And, just in case you may be wondering, the medical expenses to produce this child amounted to $250,000.
Look at what happened in Germany to the home schoolers.