Nadia Suleiman, Big Love, and Other Family Models

With all the attention given to the FDLS/Yearning For Zion scandal, the success of HBO’s Big Love, the Octuplet births, and the attendant brouhahas surrounding Prop 8 and gay marriage in particular, a new family model has quietly made its way into the pantheon of “alternatives” to the “nuclear” family.

Now, single motherhood is obviously not a new phenomenon. Forget the Murphy Brown-“cultural elite” battles of a few elections past; one need not even look at statistics of inner-city out-of-wedlock births, but notions pervasive in those (and now, other) neighborhoods that there’s nothing irresponsible about having children before one is prepared to, whether an impoverished inner-city teenager who says “Marriage is for white people”, or a Nadia Suleiman OCD archetype who is psychopathologically driven to procreate and will stop at nothing to do it.

Thankfully, there seems to be little praise from the medical/scientific community for the fertility doctors who apparently took advantage of Suleiman’s mania. More tellingly, she seems not to have gotten too many public mazeltovs from the pro-life community. Since the rabid contracontraceptionists (yes, I made that up) are so well attuned to the PR game, they must realize that Suleiman is manna from heaven to the prochoicers: she allows all pro-lifers to be tarred with the brush of her own compulsions.

(Maybe when Gov. Sarah Palin choked on her answers about contraception in her interviews with Katie Couric, Suleiman was just the kind of archetype she had in mind. And yes, I, so enamored with Palin before I saw those interviews, am turning on her with a vengeance. I blew a ton of credibility on assuming she was actually intellectually salient, when she really was a female Quayle. But I digress, as usual.)

Meanwhile, two recent articles have highlighted the new type of single motherhood: usually a somewhat accomplished woman experiencing, for whatever reason, relationship droughts (as opposed to, say, an oversexed teenager with no compunction to practice safe sex, let alone the ability to even conceptualize self-support) deciding not to wait for a relationship—marital or other—to precede childbearing.

One was Lori Gottlieb’s “The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough: Marry Him!” in the March 2008 Atlantic Monthly, which, though focused more on issues of unrealistic romantic expectations and how our protagonist realizes that she may have possibly jumped the gun by conceiving single and thereby further complicating her already limited romantic options, nevertheless kows that “it isn’t that I’m unable to accept reality and make significant compromises because that’s what grown-ups do (I can and have—I had a baby on my own).”

The other was Emily Bazelon’s “2 Kids + 0 Husbands = Family”, in the New York Times Magazine of Feb. 1, 2009. Simply put, she writes: “Many college educated mothers [are] setting up lives around other single mothers and all their children, with no role for men or romance.” Hardly the “Boston marriages” of the late 1800’s. One of her subjects’ take on marriage is that “it seems like adding on a big mess to something that comparatively stable.”

But more tellingly, in my Orthodox Jewish community, the one anathematic notion that a woman can actually conceive a child out of wedlock has been (however slowly and quietly) been turned on its head. I was recently as a Sabbath meal and I met a 39-year old lawyer (not unattractive by any account, but whom some men with issues might find “intimidating”) who had conceived twins via IV-fertilization, and the mood at the table was very supportive. There is (again slowly and quietly) a growing body of Jewish legal response treating the subject—in a surprisingly more flexible manner than one would expect. Even though the trend is ostensibly without precedent in those communities, the more conservative juristic element has had an equally hard time find salient textual support to prohibit the practice.

(Granted, at the Sabbath table I was at, none of the guests would have had the “chutzpah” to be antagonistic, as a heavy ostracistic (yes, I made that up too) response would probably be instantaneous. Still, I think the support was genuine. I certainly am supportive.)

As a tangential, but closing note, regarding Prop 8-like issues and “gay adoption”, one might consider a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy being instituted regarding such domestic partnerships’ adopting children, based on some of the models depicted above.

Yeah, I know; I’m denying that marriage is a “civil right”, and “don’t ask, don’t tell” obviously worked SOOO well in the military. I don’t expect doctrinaire progressives to call my proposal anything but bigoted. My challenge is more to those (just a little) farther to the right on the socio-political spectrum: is your opposition to such arrangements theologically/morally absolutist and therefore not grounded in logical social policy, or are you genuinely concerned with the welfare of children enough to consider alternative arrangements that might at least not lead one to directly condone relationships you find objectionable?

Think about it.