Family: Social construction
or natural phenomenon?

Brenda Almond

Issue 385, vol.97, Spring 2008

A case in point is : the expectation of home stability for a child born of a cohabiting relationship. Cohabiting relationships are statistically more unstable than married ones : and a child of an unmarried couple has a 1-in-2 risk of seeing its parents break up before it is 5 years old – while this risk reduces to 1-in-12 for a child of a married couple.

The interests of the wider community can often be at stake also, since these interests are threatened by the potential of family fragmentation to produce wide-ranging social instability. An instance of this potential is no fault divorce – which is undermining marriage as a trust-creating institution. By now, the marriage contract has been diluted to the point that it is much less binding than the average business deal. Economist Robert Rowthorn believes that if opportunism by either sex is to be avoided, fault must be seen as relevant to divorce settlements and to custody decisions.

The idea has taken root that human families can be constructed in any way people want. A consequence of this is that neither the natural mother-child relationship, nor the natural father-child relationship, is deemed to have any particular significance. Civil unions tend not to be entered into to form a procreative unit. Instead, the emphasis is on the people wanting to be with each other – and wanting to demonstrate this.

A new ideology seeks to replace the concept of the biological family with the concept of ‘family’ as a social and legal construction. Canada has even moved to exclude recognition of the category of biological parent (and any indication of sex or gender) from the whole field of family law.

It may well be time to pause in this rush for largely self-fulfilling procreation – and to reflect on what it means to cut a child off from its own genetic relatives. This makes of a child an orphan in a sense previously unknown.

The new ideology also tends to unduly favour State intervention in individual questions of child-rearing. One can almost always point to a better way for any particular child to be brought up : and there is danger of giving the State leeway to remove any child to what it deems to be a good or a better care situation.

What has been offered here is a philosophical perspective (steering clear of religious controversy) based on reason, ethics and empirical data. The evidence is indeed in, to show that children from broken homes ‘do less well’ later (on a range of measures). And it is from the point of view of children, that the issue of the family is best looked at - rather than focusing simply on what adults may feel entitled to, or want, for themselves. Children are vulnerable, and they can be deprived of important rights – not only in childhood but even at the embryonic stage, when they can be deprived of future rights…So several of the conclusions here challenge some of the cherished ‘idols’ or dogmas of our day – for instance, that populations and cultures in decline can ultimately survive – and even reframe these dogmas as the serious mistakes of the last half-century.

Brenda Almond is Professor Emerita of Moral and Social Philosophy at the University of Hull. |Her book The Fragmenting Family was published by the Oxford University Press in 2006.

(This article is based on a lecture given at the Conference on the Fragmenting Family, sponsored by the Iona Institute in Dublin, 14^th September 2007)