Sunday, June 21, 2009

NO-FATHERS DAY: National Geographic article on the Mosuo culture

If you donate a kidney to a child, you don't get rights to the child

recipient.

If you donate sperm for research or through a medical provider, you don't

get rights to the stem cells, the fetuses, or any child born thereafter.

Similarly, if you donate ova, although the process is painful and risky to

extract a few ova, unlike the fun few-minute extraction procedure for

millions of spermatazoa.

If the hairdresser cuts off your hair and uses it after you leave the

premises to make and sell eyelashes or wigs, you don't get rights in and

to her products or profits.

If you discard miscellaneous trash or construction supplies on your swale

for garbage pickup, and some artsy type comes along, takes some of it, and

creates a sculptural masterpiece, you cannot come back and claim rights in

and to the artwork.

Only the effort, the creation is rewarded.  Only the creator is the owner

of the final work.  Not the supplier of products and parts, whether got

for free or in exchange for some kind of consideration.

If a surgeon removes part of your body tissues or fluids in an operation,

saves them, and uses them to develop lines of cells, vaccines, or other

bioproducts, even for commercial profit, you get absolutely no rights or

interest in any respect to the products of your body tissues or fluids.

In fact, as a proposition of jurisprudence, there are absolutely no rights

flowing from, traced through, and accorded to the products of body parts

anywhere in the law.  With one, and only one exception.

Sperm is a half cell, produced in the male body.  Just a half cell.  It

contains a random mix of DNA bits selected from what is in turn 4 times as

much DNA total that in turn came from the random bits of two combined

half-cells from the man's parents.

100% of this DNA is shared with every human being on earth.  A tiny

portion, less than 1/10 of 1% that is sequenced slightly differently is

shared with thousands of distant relatives.  Nevertheless 99.99% of all

human DNA is exactly like that of the DNA of every other human being.

Even miniscule uniquely-sequenced portions are shared with numerous closer

relatives. 98% of human DNA is exactly like that of every chimpanzee on

earth.

Millions of sperm are contained in body fluid, and men regularly produce

and then discard trillions of these half-cells in all kinds of places,

beds, persons, Kleenex tissues, shower drains...

We are delusional with an inculcated mindset and perception, solely based

on arbitrary culture, how in the past some-thousand years most of our

western societies have been organized, to accord important status to the

particular penis from which a given sperm emanated.

There is no reason to be making such a brouhaha over who is your daddy.

It is, in fact, extraordinary that in the absence of a contract* with a

woman who risks her life to bear a child, legal rights are accorded to the

man from whose penis emanated one of millions of half-cells containing

mostly identical DNA to every other human penis on earth.

    *marriage (imperfectly, because to a large extent its terms are

    state-created or otherwise not enforceable) is the only "contract"

    permitted to women, who have been denied the right to contract

    otherwise with regard to the fruit of the efforts of their bodies.  The

    marriage contract in our societies has a history of being anywhere

    from a contract of adhesion, imbalanced and unfair to women, to

    an arrangement that is not a contract but a form of human slavery.

The marriage pseudo-contract is no longer as bad as it used to be for

women, but its terms are still largely non-negotiable.  The non-negotiable

parts ALL pertain to things in women's traditional interests -- the fruits

of her womb and homemaking efforts.  This is not so with regard to what

men traditionally contribute to marriage, property.  Even with its

improvements, the marriage contract has become irrelevant to sperm rights.

Unwed sperm donor rights are an abomination, granting a man control in and

to the life of a woman and the children she bears with absolutely no

commitment or obligation whatsoever in any way, shape or form to that

woman.

For a different perspective, and to consider our religious tradition and

social brainwashing about the "importance" of biological fatherhood,

please read:

NO-FATHERS DAY: National Geographic article on the Mosuo culture

http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/no-fathers-day.html

 

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http://www.thelizlibrary.org

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