In English Law, sperm donors may be held to be 'the real fathers' of children born through artificial insemination. Is that an unproblematic assumption? Compare notions of what makes a 'father' from two or more societies known to you.

Among the Ashanti a father has no legal authority over his children and therefore has no custody rights.  However, there are accepted duties for a father to fulfil, these are to feed, clothe and educate children in their upbringing.  This is more pronounced in reference to sons because the moral and civic training of a son is the responsibility of a conscientious father, often even after divorce.  Even though there is no legal obligation between fathers and children, it is considered very wrong not to honour these ties3.  It could be argued that because exogamy (marrying outside of the lineage) is practised there must be some form of physiological conformation that the father’s semen contribution to procreation is recognised, if incest is seen as such a heinous crime.  However, Fortes assures us that this reference to a lineage as “one blood” is more about expressing the corporate unity of the lineage than references to men’s biological connection to their children. By law a child is also considered to be the offspring of its pater (legally recognised father) and therefore a child by adultery belongs to its mother’s legal husband. Similarly, among the Nuer, Hutchinson points out that semen contribution to conception was publicly acknowledged through the extension of incest prohibitions.  Although, even holding this knowledge Nuer men regard cattle as the true source of heirs.  They perhaps try and decrease the perceived importance of semen contribution so that men can diminish the sense of personal dependence on women.  

Among the Nuer, gender distinctions are made by emphases on feminine fertility and agricultural maturation.  A woman without children is not considered fully a woman just as a man without cattle is not considered fully a man.  Hutchinson asserts that cattle stood firmly between a man and his desires to achieve personal immortality through the birth of sons (the payment of ‘bride wealth’ –cattle given to a bride’s family by her new husband- ‘guaranteed’ a man two sons).  Cattle are key to Nuer conceptions of fatherhood and societal construct as a whole, Hutchinson refers to Peter Gatkuoth (a highly respected Lou Nuer) who summed up the continuing dependence of men on the mediating role of cattle:

“Without the blood of a cow there would be nothing moving in Nuer society.  It is the blood of the cow (shed in sacrifice) that brings in the good and takes away the evil.  If I were alone without the cow, I could not build new relationships.  What this means is that, without the cow, I would not be worth much.”

A child, among the Nuer, is perhaps perceived to be closer to the mother in an ‘organic’ sense.  Hutchinson remarks than several men had confessed to her that they felt useless holding a small baby because “all the child wants is breast”, the nursing and lactating period is therefore perceived to be a period of an ‘exclusivity of relations that could no be disturbed.’  However, the blood tie between a child and its biological father does carry some social importance and it is expected that offspring will resemble their genitors in features as well as character.  Alternatively, whereas full siblings are said to be of “one mother, one breast, one blood” no blood connection is recognized between paternal half siblings –Hutchinson explains this difference through the choice of companions on a lion hunt, you would only trust your full siblings to protect you if the lion attacked, whereas half siblings could not be depended upon.

The descent connections through women are said to be unbreakable and interestingly among a patrilineally aligned society only patrilineal relations can be broken (this can be done by a formal severing of cattle obligations and rights.  Evans Pritchard remarked (1951) that “in a sense all kinship is through the mother; even kinship with the father and hence the paternal kin.”  Interestingly a man cannot legally divorce a wife and take back the ‘bride wealth’ cattle if she has had children and he is forced to maintain his paternal obligations, again symbolising a higher connection between cattle (rather than blood) and children in the paternal line.

However, Hutchinson witnessed a case which would supports and challenges a blood based definition of paternity among the Nuer.  A young Nuer woman had sex with an older Nuer woman (who had just has sex with a man), when it was found that the older woman was pregnant, she denied having intercourse with a man and the younger woman attempted to assert paternity rights over the child.  However, confusion arose when a man who the younger girl had previously had sexual intercourse with attempted to assert paternity rights.  The judge actually granted paternity rights to the man, asking “what woman has ever produced sperm?”  This would appear, as in English law, that a man’s sperm is linked to the child in such way that this perceived biological connection ensures paternity of a child.  However, among the Nuer many contradictions arise as women have become ‘pater’ over children through cattle exchange.

Barnes argues that there “seems to be no evidence that a man is programmed genetically to act differentially towards an infant merely because he has sired it.  The processes, necessary for collective survival, of socialisation, economic and political mobilisation, transmission of offices, power and resources, have facilitated, though they may perhaps not have determined, the institutionalisation of social fatherhood in some form or other.  Combined with the institution of marriage, this role of social father has provided a basis for the possible development of ideas about physical fatherhood.”   Although Barnes is not conclusive on what actually ‘makes’ a ‘father’, this argument highlights the problem mentioned in the title, if men are not social fathers purely because they are the physical fathers of a child, then how can a sperm donor be perceived to be the ‘real father’ of a child?

Barnes7 refers to Schneider’s2 argument that comparative analysis of other cultures is impossible without (either explicitly or implicitly) including your own society as “our own culture as always serves as a bass-line for cross-cultural comparison.”  Therefore when looking at the Ashanti we might say that they are wrong in assuming that a physiological connection is only shared between a mother and her offspring.  However, what makes us right?  Barnes argues that “for most of the historic period in the West, the uniqueness of physical paternity was a cultural construct for which there was very little conclusive evidence.”  Therefore the notion of fatherhood through genetics is as much a social construct as other culture’s notions of fatherhood, but the cultural construct is backed up by scientific study and so appears dependent on nature.  Among the Nuer and Ashanti, even though the necessity of sperm in reproduction is recognised, it is generally given a lower importance because it is incongruous with the way society is composed, therefore perhaps scientific fact has only proved to reaffirm our cultural ideas in Britain that paternity is closely connected with the blood tie between father and child.

Additionally what we see [the general line of reasoning in Britain] as a ‘real father’ is essentially biological because it is mostly perceived that paternity lies in biology, similarly with the Nuer perhaps, Hutchinson mentions another case where a woman had sex before marriage and had the baby whilst married to another man, before the child’s wedding this was revealed and the court case which ensued resulted in the genitor –not the present husband of the woman- receiving all the bride wealth cattle.  The judge later remarked that in Nuer law it was preferable that the genitor and pater should be the same person; that is to assume paternal rights6.   However, this was symbolised by the transfer of bride wealth cattle and therefore perhaps reiterates the prominence of the social construct among the Nuer whereby patrilineal relations are determined by cattle obligations and rights.

So what?  The issue of social versus genetic ‘father’ comes to the fore when looking at the Ashanti and the Nuer, I would argue that both societies classify paternal rights and fatherhood in accordance with the cultural construct and in turn the physiology associated with fatherhood.  As the Nuer do not seem to give predominance in paternity to the contribution of semen, and the Ashanti derive their meaning of what it means to be a ‘father’ (and what makes a ‘father’) from a spiritual contribution, it appears that a man’s ‘input’ into the creation of a child defines his status as ‘father’.  These units of input lead to paternity, simply because in English law there is prevalence towards the genetic unit justifying ‘real’ fatherhood, does not mean that cross-culturally what it means to be a ‘real father’ should be identical.  My concluding argument may appear to be too simplistic, however, and it is important to note that with reference to Schneider and Barnes’ argument that we cannot compare other cultures without being steeped in the beliefs of our own, fatherhood appears to take a wider range of culturally assigned meanings because “the real world we call nature exists independently of whatever social construction of reality we adopt.”