Parenthood is a second-order phenomenon

Parenthood is not natural. By natural I mean the given in the broadest sense — the substrate of all creative transformation, from brute matter to inborn instinct to natural (unconscious, unintentional) process and law.

Parenthood is a task and as such a function and articulation of thought and will. It manifests intention and creativity. This is what I mean by second- order phenomenon.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said, "We are born, so to speak, twice — born into existence and born into life, born human beings and born men." Unlike paternity and maternity, which are, in Rousseau's terms, on the plane of "existence" and "human beings," parenthood is on the plane of "life" and "men." In other words, parenthood is part of what the Greeks called bios — the life worlds we create for ourselves — whereas maternity and paternity are part of what the Greeks called zoe — biological, physiological being, life in the purely material sense.

As a second-order phenomenon, parenthood implies agency. It is an act, a deed we commit. And to the extent that, as I elaborate below, it involves a certain feeling or emotion that we typically call love, the pithy words of Emperor Justinian's famed general Belisarius to his stepson Photius hold true: "For it is not by ties of blood, but in very truth by deeds, that men are wont to gauge their affection for one another."

Parenthood is not a function of biology

If parenthood were a function of biology, adoptive parents, for instance, ought not to be considered parents, which is an empirically untenable proposition. It follows, then, that biology cannot be an essential component of parenthood — unless, that is, we agree on considering all forms of parenthood that are not biologically based derivative or lesser forms. This, in turn, would not only be dubious given that, as a recent study puts it, "a biological link does not guarantee an adult's commitment [and] emotional or caregiving connection to the child," but it would be especially absurd in the age of assisted reproduction, in vitro fertilization, gestational surrogacy, "third-party production" and international adoption. Parenthood comes in different forms, among which are the biological, adoptive, etcetera.

Parenthood is a form of affiliation rather than filiation, which does not mean that there cannot be parenthood that also involves filiation, and, conversely, affiliation that does not involve parenthood. But the fact that the majority of parents happen to be biologically related to their children does not mean that parenthood as such, in its very essence, ought to be understood in biological terms. "Parenthood," Emmanuel Levinas notes, "is a relation that exceeds the biological-empirical," and it cannot, as Gabriel Marcel emphasizes, "in any way be reduced to procreation."

It is high time we discarded the flesh-and-blood notion of parenthood, the view that parenthood is predicated on a direct biological link with the child, that a child is truly ours only if it shares our DNA. Genetics informs paternity and maternity, but it has no essential bearing on parenthood.

There is a passage in Anton Chekhov's novella The Black Monk that poignantly articulates the absurdity of the biological view of parenthood:

While he was consoling Tanya, Andrey surmised that, aside from this young woman and her father, there were no other people in the whole wide world who loved him as their own; if it hadn't been for these two, he, who had lost his parents at a very young age, would have probably never known that pure affection and naïve, non-judgmental love that we only feel for very close blood relatives.

The fact that Andrey experiences the love of two biological strangers as "that pure affection and naïve, non-judgmental love that we only feel for very close blood relatives" belies his concomitant restriction of this same love to blood kin, thus revealing the illogicality and confusion of his position.

Parenthood is beyond necessity

Not being a function of biology or natural programming, parenthood is an articulation of thought and will. It is a task that we set ourselves and that demands our wholehearted commitment. As such it is a matter of choice, decision and, consequently, freedom. This, in turn, means that there is nothing necessary about parenthood, in the sense that we are naturally programmed or hard-wired to become parents. While we may be hard-wired to propagate our species and to make sure that our young survive long enough to be able to take care of themselves and procreate in turn, we are not made to be parents. Unlike the propagation of the species, unlike procreation, which is an instinctual component of our make-up as living beings, parenthood is neither instinctual nor bound to happen or to be expected. (In terms of decision-making, parenthood is on a par with the free choice not to procreate, to break the natural cycle.)

Being beyond necessity, parenthood is always a miracle, for it may as well not have been. It is a gift, freely and spontaneously bestowed on ourselves and our children. This insight is staged with particular vividness and poignancy in Homer's treatment of the father-son theme in the Odyssey.

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No sooner has the council of gods decided Odysseus' safe passage back to Ithaca than Hermes is dispatched to the island of Ogygia, where Odysseus is being held captive by Calypso, to broker his release. Meanwhile, Athena, shape-shifting into Odysseus' old friend Mentes, flies to Ithaca to enjoin Telemachos — the son whom Odysseus had left behind as an infant twenty years earlier, when he set out for Troy — to travel to Pylos and Sparta and gather news about his father, who, as Telemachos learns, is alive, about to return to his kingdom and wreak vengeance on the host of suitors besieging the royal palace in quest of his mother Penelope's — the faithful, steadfast queen's and putative widow's — hand in marriage. As if to reassure himself of the identity of the young prince, whom he has presumably never laid eyes on before (or, at least, not since he was an infant), Mentes/Athena observes: "Indeed, you are strangely like [Odysseus] around the head, the fine eyes ..." Not satisfied, it would appear, with the concrete evidence of physical resemblance between the young prince and the absent king, however, Mentes/Athena further presses Telemachos for an "accurate answer" to the question: "Are you, big as you are, the very child of Odysseus?" To which Telemachos replies: "My mother says indeed I am his. I for my part do not know. Nobody...