Maternity

My mother wanted to be a doctor and ended up a homemaker. She was one of twelve kids. [1]

So my mother was a very big talker and presumably that's at least in part because she came from a big family, and she was routinely talking in an informative way about family stuff that was relevant medical history.

So when my kids had an allergic reaction to something I'm not allergic to, I knew this type of allergy ran in the family. And that fact helped me figure out WHY my kid was crying and not sleeping. I went and got the juice bottle and read the ingredients and went "Oh. His brother is allergic to the same thing and that runs in the family."

My ex-husband ended up in a world of hurt because his family was nothing like that. Our youngest came home from school with chicken pox and hubby couldn't remember having chicken pox and didn't know whether or not he had ever had it.

And I'm going "Hoo, boy. Chicken pox is not the kind of thing you forget. If you didn't have it as an infant, you REMEMBER this shit. I'm guessing you were never infected."

Adult onset chicken pox is much more serious than in childhood, which is when most people contract it. I'm MY family, I don't believe you could have gotten to adulthood and NOT known you never had it. MY mom would have drilled it into your head "Most DEATHS from chicken pox are in ADULTS. You never had this. Here is the long list of stuff you need to know to try to not DIE of chicken pox as an adult."

If someone like MY mom had raised him, we would have probably taken daddy to the doctor the day kiddo came home with chicken pox instead of waiting to SEE if daddy got sick and then daddy blowing me off repeatedly after he was infected and finally being taken against his will when I decided: his life is in danger, bozo is NOT dying on MY couch and he will either get his ass in the car or I'm calling 911 and telling them "He's a deranged soldier with combat training. The ambulance may require police backup." but one way or another, he's being seen by a doctor because my future will NOT include someone investigating WHY did hubby DIE in your care without ever seeing a doctor, hmmmm?

I am a survivor of incest twice over and I have a genetic disorder. Those two facts have weighed heavily on my mind my entire adult life and have caused me to think long and hard about various aspects of what I tend to think of as human sexual morality.

I've written before about Paternity and my opinion that the existence of state laws in the US saying "If your WIFE has a baby, that baby is your responsibility and we don't care who the father is" most likely mean that when those laws were written, they knew most women were in no position to stab hubby in the back with an illicit affair and she probably had a threesome with hubby and a friend of his and they didn't really want to publicly air this nor give a married man an easy way to cover up his bad acts by shafting both her and the resulting child when she's essentially his property.

A large part of human sexual morality is about doing right by any resulting children and this is a primary driving force behind valuing monogamy: We know who both parents are, it gives us one parent to raise them and another to provide for them and keeps the logistics manageable because it's challenging to try to raise kids with half siblings and step parents and etc. 

That can work if one parent died and the surviving parent remarries and you form another nuclear family. But if there are multiple fathers for one woman's still minor children or multiple mothers for one man's still minor children and you aren't all living together as an extended family, those children end up denied a lot of things that children in a nuclear family typically grow up with.

If you don't know who your father is at all, you are denied substantial family medical history which can be a matter of life and death. This is a central plot point in the movie Family of Strangers where a woman learns she was adopted and was given up for adoption because she was the product of sexual assault and she needs to know family medical history to make a critical surgical decision for her child whose life hangs in the balance.

Even if you do know who he is but he and his extended family are not a big part of your life, you are denied the kind of lifesaving information I had from my mother's running patter that many people would view as family gossip.

This is something I have also touched on briefly elsewhere with regards to Civil Rights for Black Americans: Never mind MONETARY reparations, is ANYONE working on helping people actually track down who their ancestors are?

And I know we just feed everyone SHIT and keep them in the dark about this garbage because I have never heard that the grandfather clause of Jim Crow laws was ever challenged on the basis of "Yeah, no. MY grandfather was the White plantation owner of my Black grandmother, so your bullshit attempt to deny me voting rights but grant illiterate Whites voting rights doesn't actually exclude me because MY grandfather could READ even though the LAW allowed him to disavow me as his heir and denied me the right to learn to read."

I have put off saying anything about this because we live in a patriarchal society and the laws tend to advantage and empower men and shaft women and that's layered on top of biology making it easy for men to sleep around casually while being a gun to the head of women to not do that.

I believe that it would be morally better for a woman who makes money like a man to casually sleep around and intentionally have a baby out of wedlock than to try to entrap a husband or secretly get pregnant by an illicit lover to keep her husband by having the baby they want. It's not a perfect solution, but it's the lesser evil to admit "He's not a bad guy. He didn't hurt me. But honestly I don't know who fathered you. I just wanted a baby, but if you end up try to identify him for some reason, be aware you may be opening a can of worms because he doesn't know about you."

Children who think they know who their daddy is and think they know their father's family medical history because they have been lied to their entire lives have a problem they don't even know they have and it can have disastrous or even deadly consequences.

So I think knowing who your biological father is or at least knowing the truth that it's not the man who raised you and we don't actually know is something children should have a right to know.

I was never in a position where there was any doubt in my mind who the father was, but I did spend some time wondering what I would do if I wasn't sure because I felt strongly my child has a right to that information about themselves and never mind what that may mean for my marriage.

This problem is a thorny problem to solve in part because we currently make female sexuality a commodity to sell to the highest bidder and marrying well is the primary way we expect women to pay their bills. So women feel enormous pressure to appear to be faithful and lie about who the father is if it isn't their husband, among other issues.

My understanding is that matrilineal societies where your mother determines both your lineage and inheritance rights are less drama in this regard. Men are much more concerned about making sure their wife is faithful if her children inherit from him and have rights to his assets when he may not know for sure if he's really the father.

Because prior to modern medical testing for blood type or genetic testing, the only real test we had was "Does the kid look like him?"

Three of the first four men I slept with had blonde hair and blue eyes. If your two lovers look alike and you get pregnant, you may have no way to be sure short of genetic testing.

I don't know how to sort this out but this was a factor in me trying like hell to actually be very picky about sexual morality: So I didn't need to ever have a hard decision to make about should I tell the kid who their real father is knowing my kids don't REALLY WANT to hear "Your mom is a ho." or similar.

And I believe this is part of why women get so much pressure to be "good girls": Because we all know if you are financially dependent on your husband and unfaithful and conceive a child, we currently have no good solutions where mom and child have any hope of turning out okay.

Telling the child the truth is a crushing and stigmatizing event. Not telling the child may leave them maimed for life or cost them their life in a medical emergency. 

And trying to broach the issue at all may leave mom and child out in the cold financially by revealing her infidelity as the infidelity itself may be grounds for divorce even if ultimately it turns out her husband is the father.

Footnote 

[1] My mother's father had another child with his second wife that my mom never met, so my mother always talked about being one of twelve kids, not thirteen.