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                                                                                U.S. POLITICS, Page 30

Why Quayle Has Half a Point


By MARGARET CARLSON


    When last we say Babu Brown's father, it was shortly
after conception and well before birth. He's off now saving the
rain forest, having opted out of Lamaze class and changing
diapers. He may come back, but the show's premise is built
around the notion that a woman who has made it in a man's world
without one should be lionized for doing so alone through the
"terrible twos" and beyond. The lack of a dad is not accidental
but a running-joke opportunity. For the successful, glamorous
woman who has everything: Now, live from Hollywood, your very
own baby, father optional.

    There is nothing new about having babies without getting
married. What's new is society's attitude, which has gone from
punishing it, to tolerating it, to celebrating it. Ah, Murphy,
she is too darn busy and successful to have a baby the
old-fashioned way, and anyhow, men are jerks. With her high
income, Brown seems a poor vehicle for examining the problem of
children born without fathers. Yet she has more in common with
the inner-city teenager than we might think. The 14-year-old
gets pregnant as a way to give her life meaning. Murphy Brown
and fortyish women like her want a tiny version of their nearly
perfect selves to give their lives more meaning.

    Among other things, being a Murphy Mom means having
postponed childbirth until your salary has reached the upper
brackets and you have sufficient disposable income to employ a
full-time muralist and buy enough Scandinavian furniture to
induce existential dread. But even at the upper end, where the
career track is fast and the dress code is for success, there
can come the nagging feeling that this might not be all there
is. By then, of course, the flexibility to tolerate a big lug
leaving his dirty socks on the floor and the luxury of having
time to find one are both in short supply. It takes a tiny leap
for those accustomed to satisfying every whim to see a baby as
one more choice. It is a way to turn a life-style into a life
in nine months.

    Babies also fit into the new stay-at-home-but-keep-a-Range-
Rover-in-the-garage mentality. Shopping for the Bloomie's Baby
layette has replaced comparing the $400 Gaggia cappuccino maker
to the Braun. People who own fish poachers now wonder what in
the world they were thinking of. To judge by fat and glossy
Child magazine, the Vogue of the play-date set, cloning oneself
opens up a whole new buying opportunity.

    But single pregnancy (as opposed to those single-mother
households where the father remains active in the child's life)
is not necessarily glamorous for the child, even at the
upper-economic end. Has anyone ever met a child happy not to
know who his father is? In the projects, the boy with a father
is king. In the wider world, children may go astray and end up
being moral relativists, but in their formative years, they
adhere to a code of conduct more traditional than the decor at
Williamsburg, Va.

    I know three women, all of them well meaning but as
self-absorbed as the rest of their generation, who find
themselves overwhelmed by the yearning for a baby. In the past
few years, they have come to see life without a child like the
world beyond the Hudson River in the famous Saul Steinberg
poster about New York City. It hardly exists. Adoption is an
option, of course, but that is not the way of some baby boomers.
They want happiness now -- on their own terms -- and if they
have to steal from the next generation to have it, they will.

    Single pregnancy commingles the worst of the Me decade --
let's have more of Me -- with feminism, which seeks to make it
as much a woman's as a man's world. Nowhere do men have more of
an edge than in being able to marry women 60 years their junior
and still reproduce themselves. Unfortunately, there is no
legislation to correct this injustice.

    It is hypocritical for Dan Quayle to denounce single
motherhood on one hand and abortion on the other. But he does
have a point: having both a mother and a father is not some
Republican affectation but an ideal to strive for. Coming into
the world with one parent is a handicap, no matter how mature
and moneyed the mother may be. Just because fatherhood can be
reduced to 20 seconds, or dispensed with altogether by tapping
into Nobel-prizewinner sperm banks, does not mean it should be.
Imagine if men decided that motherhood was equally expendable.
Sated with their corner offices and home gyms, guys of a certain
age could go around paying women to have babies for them. The
howl of feminists over such selfish, macho pigs could tie up
talk-radio lines for years. Fatherhood may take moments,
motherhood nine months, but doing it right takes the lifelong
commitment of both parents.

    Mothers, single and otherwise, are heroic in the ways,
large and small, they make up to their children for absent,
negligent or destructive fathers. Children can thrive in many
circumstances. But there is a danger in the current attitude
that plays down the deficit with which a child enters the world
with half a family and that places a woman's self-fulfillment
first. Hard as it is to hear the biological clock ticking and
not be able to do anything about it, gratifying the yearning to
have a child is not the same as satisfying the other indexes of
having it all. Some yearnings in life go unfulfilled. What is
socially and emotionally acceptable to a woman may not be so to
a child purposefully brought into the world with a hole at the
center of his life where a father would be.