Families with children

In an essay on ” Abortion and Personhood ,” Alastair Roberts suggests that “”taking a stand against same-sex marriage is essentially a pro-life matter.”

Roberts continues: “the paradigmatic family of liberal ideology is the same-sex couple with adopted children or children born through reproductive technology, a family of purely volitional attachments (every child is chosen) between undifferentiated individual sexual agents for whom gender need not be stipulated, creating a privatized realm of sentimental bonds, where bodies are clearly autonomous and all relationships boil down to romantic or emotional attachment adumbrated by contract.”

He points out the consequences of same-sex marriage on our understanding of “family”: “Same-sex marriage leads us to deny or undermine the ordering of the institution of marriage towards children. Children become a secondary storey that may or may not be added to the relationship. It presents sex as a univocal reality, no longer ordered towards procreation. It denies or undermines the privileged and unique character of the sexual relationship between men and women as it relates to procreation and parenthood. It treats the parental roles of mother and father as interchangeable or dispensable. It downplays the significance of the marital ideal of children being conceived out of the loving intercourse of the pledged bodies of their parents. It relativizes the importance of the bonds of blood that connect us to our offspring and to or wider families. It hastens the voluntarization of the concept of parenthood. And, let’s not fool ourselves: it is in connection with the same-sex family that the widespread use of reproductive technology to circumvent any need to procreate naturally will become normalized, and come to be regarded as the right of the individual sexual agent.”