Why would someone like Sami Lukis need a sperm donor?

Sami Lukis is an exceptionally beautiful Australian TV personality. She is now 41. But how might she have made use of her abundant feminine charms as a younger women?

One option would have been to take advantage of her beauty to attract a high quality husband - a man who would have loved her, been loyal to her and who would have had the character to be a good husband and father. The type of man she could have successfully formed a family with.

This option would have allowed her to have children and to have devoted her youthful beauty and fertility to her husband, so that he would have bonded strongly with her and wanted to be with her even when her beauty faded and her fertility was lost. It would also have allowed her to pass on a culture of family life to her own children, so that she might have later on enjoyed being a grandmother whilst still at an active age.

But Sami Lukis did not take this option. She did the modern girl thing instead. She by no means rejected marriage and motherhood, but she decided to defer it to the last moment:

I always knew I wanted a baby. It just wasn't a priority until my late 30s.

So what did she do in the meantime? She had a string of relationships with unsuitable men:

She said, however, that given her time again she would not have wasted so many years on relationships that she didn't think were leading to children.

And what is her plan now? She is going to attempt to do IVF as a single woman, make a TV show about it ("Sami's baby") and try to find a husband afterward:

I have the rest of my life to meet Mr Right, but I only have limited time to have a baby.

So if she does manage to have a baby (not guaranteed at age 41 even with IVF), the child won't know its biological father. And her future husband (if there is one), won't get much at all of what men used to get out of marriage - no children, no youthful feminine beauty and passion - he will have been put last on the modern girl list of things to do and he will end up working to bring up a sperm donor's baby.

I can understand Sami Lukis's overwhelming desire to have a child:

Lukis...is worried she might have left her attempt to have a baby too late. "As a woman you have this amazing opportunity to have children, to have that mother/child bond our bodies are created this way," she said. "I don't want to miss out on being a mum, it's a basic instinct."

But we somehow have to get through to women like Sami Lukis that the modern girl option is no way to go about securing her future.

It also raises the moral question of whether single women should be accessing IVF to deliberately create fatherless families. Doesn't this send the message that the government doesn't think fathers are necessary to family life, but are at best some sort of optional enhancement?

Herald Sun columnist Susie O'Brien took on this moral issue. In response to reports that 500 single women have used IVF treatments in Victoria in the past year alone, she asked the question:

Do we really need biological fathers?

Her initial answer seems straightforward and clear:

Yes, absolutely.

But she just can't follow through consistently with this answer. She's in an impossible position. She doesn't want to give up on the idea of men being necessary to family life. But she also wants to give her blessing to lesbian couples and single women having children without men. So she refuses to admit that there is any contradiction in her position:

It is possible to passionately support the right of dads in our society, and still support the right of single women and same-sex couples to have kids.

And how does Susie uphold the "right of dads"? She claims that a "father figure" such as a family friend can "do the job just as well" as a biological father. And she writes:

You just have to accept that these days there are lots of different kinds of fathers.

And she then goes on to declare:

The exact permutations of who lives with who, who's married to whom and what their biological origins might be don't really matter to me.

Well, there you have it. She's gone from her initial position of fathers mattering "absolutely" to the idea that whether there's a father around or not doesn't "really matter".

And to underline this point she then finishes her column by quoting Sami Lukis to the effect that her child will be loved, father or not. Susie O'Brien thinks this is the key thing:

And in the end isn't that the only thing that really matters?

So why then did she say at the start that fathers matter absolutely? Perhaps because she doesn't want to put her own husband in the unnecessary category. Perhaps because she recognises at some level the implications of what she is arguing and is reluctant to spell them out too clearly.

Let me say here that Susie O'Brien couldn't be more wrong. If men were to believe the kinds of things she is arguing, then it would be all over for Western society. A society can only exist at a high level if men believe that their role within a family is a distinct and necessary one.

The answer to the Sami Lukis problem is not to declare fathers optional within family life. It's to give priority to family formation at the right time in life.