These days, we’re told that kids don’t really need their mom or dad.
But is this really true?
No, and here’s why.
1. A Child’s Right To Their Parents Is A Natural Right
We’ve already shown that a child’s right to their mother and father qualifies as a natural right because:
- The parent-child bond existed before any government.
- No one provides parents. If a child exists, so do their biological mother and father.
- Everyone has exactly two biological parents—one mother and one father. No more, no less.
This meets the three rules that make a natural right: it predates government, doesn’t require provision, and is equally distributed.
2. Children Need The Socioemotional Trinity
Children need more than just food and shelter. To thrive emotionally, they need three key things:
- Their father’s love
- Their mother’s love
- A stable home
The best chance of getting all three is when their mother and father are married to each other. Yet every decade, fewer children receive all three.
That’s why defending a child’s right to both their parents is so important. Doing so dramatically increases a child’s chances of educational and career success. It reduces the risks of poverty, crime, and abuse.
All this doesn’t require massive state spending. Just a committed mother and father, raising the child they brought into the world.
3. Parental Rights Begin With Children’s Rights
Whether legal systems recognise this right is a separate matter. Children have a right to their own mother and father because parents have a right to their own children.
Think about it. Parents don’t leave the hospital with just any baby, they leave with their baby. And not just because they want that specific child, but because they’re uniquely responsible for that child’s existence.
That responsibility is baked into law. Parental obligations like child support aren’t optional. If parents neglect or abuse their children, the state steps in. This presumes what most people instinctively know: If you create a child, you’re responsible for raising them.
Consent to sex is consent to parenthood. Once a new life is created, the duty to love and care for that life begins.
4. Children And Their Parents Have Rights To Each Other
A child’s right to their parents may often conflict with adult desires. But children’s rights don’t conflict with parental rights, they confirm them.
In this unique relationship, rights are mutual. The mother and father have the right and the obligation to raise their child because they are the only two people responsible for the child’s existence. Likewise, the child has a right to be raised by those two people for that very reason. The bond is not created by law, it’s created by biology.
We see this even in cases of adoption or assisted reproduction:
- If a child is placed for adoption, the birth parents must formally relinquish their legal claim.
- If a child is conceived via sperm or egg donation, the donors must sign away their parental rights.
As parental rights expert Melissa Moschella puts it:
“Biological parents have a strictly nontransferable obligation to love their children themselves… in order to love their children adequately, biological parents must raise those children themselves, except in cases of genuine incompetence. These obligations correlate to children’s absolute right to be loved by their biological parents, and to children’s strong prima facie right to be raised by them.”
Once adults bring a child into existence, the child has a right to be loved, known, and raised by those very adults.
The World Agrees: Children Need Their Parents
You don’t have to be religious or conservative to believe this. The United Nations (UN) says the same.
In 1989, the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It’s now the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Its key articles state that:
- Children have the right to be known and cared for by both their parents (Article 7)
- Children have a right to know their biological identity and extended family (Article 8)
- Children should not be separated from their parents (Article 9)
- If separated, children have the right to remain in contact with their parents (Article 10)
- Both parents are responsible for bringing up their child (Article 18)
In short: children are not accessories that adults acquire to fulfil emotional needs. They are persons with rights. As Rabbi Gilles Bernheim once said, “Children are subjects of rights, not objects of rights.”
Yet, adults today often prioritise their personal desires, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, above children’s needs. Helen Alvaré, adviser to Them Before Us, observes that adult sexual expressionism has been “valorised” at the expense of children’s rights.
In the US, only 43 percent of children grow up with both their mother and father. Many never know one of their parents at all.
The trend is going in the wrong direction, and children are the ones paying the price.
Abortion and Donor Conception: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Other examples of this adults-first approach include abortion and donor conception.
Generally speaking, an abortion is the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy.
It says, “If the child is unwanted, we can end their life, even if it violates their right to live.”
Donor conception is a process where a baby is conceived through sperm or eggs donated by another couple or someone other than one’s spouse. Sometimes, even the embryo itself is donated.
It says, “If the child is very wanted, we can force them into existence, even if it violates their right to their mother or father (the sperm/egg donor).”
Abortion and donor conception are two sides of the same coin – both treat children as commodities, something to be acquired or disposed of depending on adult convenience.
Yes, we may sympathise with women facing unplanned pregnancies. But we also believe that adults must conform to a child’s right to life.
Likewise, we can empathise with couples struggling with infertility, or LGBT individuals who want children, but we must insist that all adults must conform to children’s rights, not the other way around.
We see the horror of abortion when we realise that the unborn child is a human being. Similarly, we’ll only see the harm of intentional fatherlessness and motherlessness when we see the pain children experience when they grow up without their father or mother.
All children, whether unwanted or desperately wanted, have rights. Adults must adjust their lives accordingly.
What About Adoption?
But what about adoption, you may ask? Isn’t that also suboptimal, since the child isn’t raised by their biological parents?
Adoption tries to mend what’s broken. It steps in only when a child cannot be raised by their birth parents. The goal is to provide maternal and paternal love where there would otherwise be none.
Adoption puts the child first from start to finish. It tries placing them with relatives, keeping siblings together, and considering the child’s wishes and needs.
Prospective parents must provide personal references and undergo house visits, interviews, parenting classes, financial assessments, and background checks. Even then, they can still be denied a placement no matter how much they want it.
Adoptive parents adjust their lives for the child, not the other way around. They conform to the child’s needs, not demand that the child conform to their desires.
Donor Conception And Same-Sex Parenting
Donor conception flips this script. It creates the very loss adoption tries to fix by intentionally denying children their biological mother or father from the outset. Anyone who pays can access it, and the child must give up their natural right to both biological parents to satisfy adult desires.
Adoption finds parents for an orphan, while donor conception creates orphans for adults by relegating a child’s biological mother or father to a mere donor. Adoption prioritises children, while donor conception commoditises them. Adoption is sometimes necessary. Donor conception never is.
Finally, while both same-sex and heterosexual adoption offer parental affection, that’s where the similarities end. Unlike heterosexual adoption, same-sex adoption assumes that two moms or two dads can take the place of a mom and a dad – that fathers and mothers are replaceable.
But children need both. Their mother and father each offer something distinct, and neither is interchangeable.
And that’s what children’s rights is all about.
The Case For Childrens’ Rights
Children have a natural right to both their mother and father. Not because it makes adults feel good, but because it gives children the best chance to flourish.
We must stop shaping family around adult desires and start building society around children’s needs.
Because when we honour children’s rights, everyone wins.
