A New Kind of Bachelor Father : When Single Women Opt for Parenthood, the Man Isn’t Always In on the Plan

He was a Jewish/Unitarian minister hitchhiking at the corner of Venice and Sepulveda. And he had no idea the woman who picked him up had long sought to be what she considered a “politically correct” single mom.

Before meeting him, she had even placed an ad for a man to father her child in the liberal Mother Jones magazine, figuring “men of the political left were more open to alternate forms of parenting.”

But years later, after failing to woo a set of desirable genes with her classified come-on, L.A. Weekly Health Editor Carolyn Reuben had given up classified ads for serendipity.

She remembers reading the hitchhiker’s apparel accurately: “Professional man temporarily stranded without a car.” She pulled over. He hopped in. As she recounts what followed, the two 38-year-olds fell instantly, magically in lust--possibly even love.

‘Knew This Was It’

“We just both knew this was it. . . . We started trying to have a child right away. We were sure we were going to be a family,” says Jonathan Reich, the hitchhiking clergyman who worked at the Unitarian Society Los Angeles West when the couple met in late 1985.

By May of ‘86, they’d created a pregnancy. And by August, they’d split up.

“It turned out that we didn’t get along, that we could never make our relationship work. But she really wanted to have the baby,” says Reich, now 42.

Enter the dilemma that more and more men are facing as the biological clocks of their single, childless sex partners wind down.

Consider just a few of the possible permutations when a pregnancy occurs but the mother wishes to remain unmarried:

Does the father consider himself a mere sperm provider--a surrogate father, as it were--free to walk away from fatherhood and its legal/financial/emotional responsibilities?

Or does he jump in, get involved in the pregnancy, childbirth and rearing of the child even though he may have neutral or even angry feelings for the mother?

Might Prefer Self-Destruction

How about the guy who wants to participate in fathering, but the mother would prefer he simply disappear or self-destruct?

Or the man who has been asked by a woman to father a child for her, but with the knowledge that there will be no romantic involvement and perhaps no co-parenting privileges? Can he live with that initially--and perhaps later, when there is a child eager to know its father?

Nobody keeps statistics on how many men find themselves pondering these and other complexities of the late 20th Century, but there are some indicators that suggest the number is likely growing.

UCLA’s annual Southern California Social Survey found that attitudes toward single motherhood have loosened considerably. A whopping 50% of Southern California women surveyed said that, if they were to find themselves childless and approaching the end of their childbearing years, they would consider having a child without a husband or live-in partner.

According to UCLA social psychologist Belinda Tucker, who supervised the marital questions area of the survey, men were not asked if they would consider fathering a child for a single woman outside of marriage. But after a report of the survey’s results was recently published in The Times, Tucker received plenty of incensed, if informal feedback.

“The reaction of a lot of men around here (UCLA) and a lot of people who called was a threatened one,” she says. “They really didn’t like the fact that so many women would say ‘You’re not needed.’ I kind of wish now that we had asked men that question.”

And Dr. Kyle Pruett, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University and author of the recently published “The Nurturing Father,” reports that since his book has come out, “I’ve heard of, well, I guess the adjective is a startling number of stories of men who have considered themselves rather casual biological donors, witting or unwitting.

“I guess the one thing that I would want to emphasize is that no matter how casually a man may think about this at the begining of the relationship or non-relationship, it comes as quite a surprise to many men to learn that a donation of spermatozoa often carries with it more than protein,” Pruett says. “And that the emotional interest in the fetus, its health, its growth and development and its eventual birth and delivery have captivated more than a few of them, even when they’re not emotionally involved with the women.

“The idea that their genetic contribution takes shape in another body haunts many of them emotionally, many more than you would think.”

Information Found Him

Pruett stresses that he didn’t go looking for this information. It found him--rather off-guard as it turned out. “I sort of bought the party line before, the sort of one-night-stand male sperm contribution, disappearing on the morning train,” he admits. “It turns out to be maybe a myth we’d like to perpetuate because it makes the situation easier to deal with.”

In the case of the minister and the health editor, the relationship quickly turned disagreeable. However, both agreed they “weren’t committed to each other, but we were both committed to the child,” Reich says. Thus he attended natural childbirth classes with Reuben, took pictures during the birth and cut their daughter’s umbilical cord.

Though both parents acknowledge there were hot fights over visitation scheduling--and threats of solving the problem in court--the two eventually worked through their differences on their own.

‘We Healed’

“Gradually what happened over time was that we healed from the hurt we had inflicted on each other,” says Reich, who is a doctoral student now married to a professor in De Kalb, Ill., with whom he is expecting a child in November.

In the meantime, he flies to Los Angeles every six to eight weeks to visit his daughter and regularly sends Reuben child support payments, “giving what I think is generous and what I can afford . . . it means I skip the $3.50 gourmet lunch in the chandelier room and make myself a sandwich.”

As for Reuben, she’s pleased with the way in which the arrangement finally worked out and says she has been approached by several single men eager to be fathers asking if she knows any more women looking to become single moms.

“What I think is absolutely necessary is not a mating service, but a referral service to connect the men who are longing to be fathers with the women who are longing to be mothers,” she concludes. “If love looms, that’s wonderful. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Keith Vacha would agree. A gay man who lives in San Francisco, he clearly wasn’t in love with the lesbian woman for whom he agreed to father a child.

But he had been wanting to have a child for about 10 years.

An Unfulfilled Need

“I have a nurturing side of me that needs to be fulfilled,” he explains. “I didn’t believe the fact that I’m gay should be an obstacle in stopping me from loving a child. And having known so many people from ‘broken’ homes where there’s been ugly divorce and they seemed to survive, I thought it was possible to have a two-household family where there was a lot of love for the child.”

After discussing this possibility with several heterosexual women, Vacha says he was distressed to learn that their first questions seemed to center on money: “How are we going to do this financially?” Vacha claims he wasn’t opposed to contributing child support but after he gave his name to the leader of an East Bay group called Lesbians Considering Motherhood, he found the potential mothers there “more financially independent” and concerned about the emotional welfare of a child.

With one of them, he wound up discussing the possibility of a co-parenting arrangement, a discussion that continued off and on for 2 1/2 years before it reached fruition.

“We had similar temperaments. I felt we were able to resolve conflicts. She was actively looking for a father to be actively involved. That was the only way I’d do it,” says Vacha, 37, a social service administrator, writer and author of “Quiet Fire: Memoirs of Older Gay Men.”

At-Home Project

A simple, at-home artificial insemination was arranged, with the woman using an eyedropper of Vacha’s sperm. “A lot of people are under the impression they have to go to a doctor’s office when it’s the oldest, easiest thing to do,” he points out.

(Indeed, according to Los Angeles psychologist Annette Baran, co-author of “Lethal Secrets, The Shocking Consequences and Unsolved Problems of Artificial Insemination,” the practice of such at-home, low-tech artificial insemination has been commonplace since the late 19th Century. “We’ve been using it for 100 years,” she says. “We learned it from animal husbandry. You don’t need any special equipment or training.”)

Because Vacha and the mother of their child have been open about their birthing and parenting arrangement, theirs is not the sort of clandestine arrangement chastised in Baran’s book--which argues against keeping donor insemination pregnancies a secret from the offspring and others.

Not Without Problems

But that’s not to imply Vacha’s co-parenting experience has been entirely problem-free.

“I was involved through the entire pregnancy. I was at the birth . . . and took care of the baby alone when she was 6 months old,” Vacha recalls, adding that his daughter is now 3 years old.

“I think our problems are the same as any parents . . . trying to bring up a healthy child in a difficult world. You want the child to feel free and good about herself, for instance, and know she has unlimited potential. But at the same time you have to turn around and say, ‘No, you can’t throw things against the wall.’ I think everyone goes through that.”

Vacha doesn’t anticipate any unusual difficulties stemming from the fact that both the child’s parents are gay. “She’s growing up in a world with a lot of gay people and heterosexual people both,” he notes. “And she goes to a school where there are many different kinds of parenting situations.”

Even one of Vacha’s relatives who warned he’d be miserable with the arrangement and “stuck with all the financial responsibilities,” wound up being the first to send him a Father’s Day card. And he points to a bonus he didn’t count on in the beginning. He and the mother of his child “have come to care for and love each other--the only thing our daughter gets from us is respect and care, a lot of positive enforcement.”

But what about the men for whom Father’s Day greetings are either nonexistent or excruciating reminders of battles lost, feelings ignored, rights denied?

“For many of the guys I get (coming to United Fathers of America), becoming a father is not voluntary. They’re not told that in the beginning,” says Rod Bivings, president and founder of United Fathers of America, which is based in Los Angeles. “I have yet to get a case in which a woman has asked a man to father her child. Usually it stems from the normal series of (sexual) events.”

Bivings’ organization represents fathers with all sorts of paternity, visitation and custody disputes, and he estimates that between 25% and 30% of the group’s 1,000 paid members are single men who have fathered children the old-fashioned way--through physical intimacy--and who have then been denied what the organization considers to be their father’s rights.

He acknowledges that “the responsibility for birth control should belong to both men and women,” and points out that as a result of deceptions, today’s men are “becoming more careful about it.”

‘A Very Hot Topic’

“(The issue has) become a very hot topic,” Bivings continues. “I hear about some of those it turns out well for, but men don’t come to see me unless they’re in a world of hurt and need a way to solve their problems. This is sort of like their last resort.”

One Los Angeles man in such a world of hurt says he unwittingly fathered a child after a brief sexual relationship with a woman. The man, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, claims the woman broke off their sexual relationship after she became pregnant and eventually told him to get lost.

He says his attorney has advised him that it might not even be worth it for him to gain legal visitation rights--because the mother had demonstrated her willingness to lie about his conduct during court hearings, and because she apparently is intent on fighting an expensive, emotionally draining legal battle.

Even if he won visitation rights, the man says his attorney warned him that the mother could continue to lie to the court about his behavior with the child, and he could easily face additional trauma and aggravation during the child’s first 18 years. Or the mother could move out of state, in which case he would still have to pay child support--which is automatically adjudicated with visitation rights--yet have a difficult time seeing his child.

Currently, the man, who says he was duped into fathering the child, is upset that he has no visitation rights and is unhappy with his attorney’s advice.

‘It’s Beyond Sad’

“I could be in this for years, paying money to an attorney while paper is floated back and forth and I still wouldn’t be able to see the child. It’s cruel. It’s beyond sad,” he says. “I have to treat this as though my child is dead. I am in a serious period of grief and nobody cares. I love my child. I was trying to do something decent, being a father.”

The man says his attorney has advised him to walk away, find a wife, start a new life and have another child--all for his own good.

His response?

“I don’t even trust women anymore at the moment.”

According to Dick Woods, director of Iowa-based National Congress of Men, the man’s situation is hardly rare.

“I see a lot of paternity by deception,” says Woods, whose group serves as a clearinghouse for men’s rights groups such as United Fathers of America. “Father’s rights cases have generally not done well in the courts. Probably half of those who have brought the cases have won some kinds of rights, but the father has to have the money and the stick-to-it-iveness to go through a very difficult process.”

For that and other reasons, Woods’ organization routinely advises men not to participate in knowingly fathering children for single women.

Lack of Rights Noted

“We strongly recommend against it, mainly because of (the man’s) liability and lack of rights,” he says. “. . . First off, he is at tremendous risk of her quitting her job, going on ADC (Aid to Dependent Children), then if she has personally agreed and maybe even signed a legal paper not to come after him for child support--even if that’s happened, when she goes on ADC, the state will come after him anyway for money. That’s a federal law.”

Visitation Rights

As for state laws, Woods adds that there are wide variations among the states on visitation rights, paternity statutes and custody procedures.

But frequently, amicable solutions are created outside the judicial system. One man who reached an out-of-court settlement for joint custody of a son he fathered is Bret Hampton.

“It was sobering,” says Hampton, 39, recalling the time he learned he had a son. “I was closing in on 30 and it came at a time when I was starting to wonder if I was going to be married and have kids.”

Though the mother of his son refused to even talk to him for quite a while after their child was born, Hampton remembers that he persistently tried to make peace with her and to win the right to interact with the boy, now 9.

“Right now she and I are getting along pretty well but it’s taken years to get to this point,” says Hampton, a video editor who works in Los Angeles.

As for his son’s feelings, Hampton feels he’s become comfortable with the arrangement: “On one hand, all he’s ever known is he has two parents who don’t live together. I think he’d like one of us to get married. He sometimes asks me if I’m going to get married--or asks the person I’m dating.”

Though Hampton is obviously delighted to have a son in his life, he’s adamant that he would never help a single woman have a child if he were asked.

“I like kids too much,” Hampton insists. “I’d want to be involved. It would bother me too much not to know what was happening. I think you make a mistake if you assume anything.”