In light of a recent interview, Damilola Makinde asks: is there more to motherhood than autonomy?
“It’s an embrace of my own autonomy…I have no regrets.”
These are the words spoken by former CNN news anchor Isha Sesay in a recent interview where she explained her decision to become a single mother by choice and use a sperm donor to conceive her now 3-year-old daughter.
A Sierra-Leonean woman born in Britain and now based in the United States, Sesay speaks in the interview of how her unconventional path to motherhood has prompted strong opinions from people she doesn’t know, many of whom understand it in affronting terms. As a fellow African, I can empathise. Nigerians are famous for many things, and staying out of other people’s business isn’t one of them. Every now and again, even well-meaning people need to be told where else to put their opinions.
Of her choice of a sperm donor to support her pregnancy, Sesay says, “It’s not a rejection of anyone. It’s an embrace of my own autonomy.” The picture she lays out is clear and relatable, both as an African seeking freedom from the confines of cultural norms, and as a woman with a desire to have a family of my own. It is not that Sesay set out to start a family in this way. Life happened, and having found herself in an unexpected set of circumstances, she decided to utilise her agency (and – it must be said – her wallet) to build the life she had hoped to have. “I was like give me that website and let me find a donor. Let me do this on my own.”
It’s not a rejection of anyone. It’s an embrace of my own autonomy.”
The results are a toddler whose face beams before cameras, a woman relishing the many delights of motherhood, and at least two new casualties in expressive individualism’s continued war on reality.
Because, of course, Sesay hasn’t just chosen for a donor to help her have a child.
She has also chosen for her daughter to do without the help of a father. She has decided that she (and presumably her child) are better off as a two. She is clear that her decision is not about rejecting men (because that would make it about someone other than herself). I imagine her social network and financial means will enable her daughter to have relatively easy access to any trusted and responsible men in Sesay’s life, and cameras and phones will quickly plug any sustained gaps in male communication. But God’s design is not for a child to have disposable digital dads. God’s design is for a child to be raised by its mother and father.
But God’s design is not for a child to have disposable digital dads. God’s design is for a child to be raised by its mother and father.”
In our broken world, there are a number of reasons why children cannot always be raised in this way, and there are a child-focused and truth-honouring ways of offering children alternative family structures, formally through mechanisms like fostering and adoption, and informally through the supportive influence of a Christ-exalting, other-person-centred community known as the church. Making concessions in light of broken situations is, however, altogether different to instigating and pursuing broken situations because we think we can bend reality to suit us without reality snapping back.
Isha Sesay’s child is of her own, medically assisted creation. God’s world is His, and His wisdom guides its affairs. It is much easier to calculate the cost of an IVF, donor-enabled birth than it is to track the cost of wilfully violating God’s wisdom for child flourishing and human relationships.
God’s wisdom for child-flourishing is nested within God’s pronouncement of blessing on the first humans:
So God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.””
Fruitfulness for them and for the world will flow from the complementary and distinctive contributions of these vice-regents of God who are enlisted to inhabit and pursue God’s pleasure as they live in His world.
The Bible features a number of dysfunctional family stories, but this never detracts from the wisdom of God’s original design. The book of Proverbs repeatedly frames the good life as one lived following the input and instruction of a father and mother.
Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.”
A wise son brings joy to his father, but a foolish man despises his mother.”
If someone curses their father or mother, their lamp will be snuffed out in pitch darkness.”
A well-formed life is a well-connected life, shaped and moulded by the collective and complementary wisdom of one’s mother and father.
In this world, instituted at God’s initiative and sustained by God, there is more to what is right and wrong than what suits an individual’s preferences and what furthers their objectives. Humans aren’t props in each other’s stories; we are participants in the story of God. God’s design furnishes us with the provision and the parameters we need to live fully and deeply, and while in our day it may be possible to circumvent the conventions of child-creation, we cannot circumvent God’s wisdom for child-flourishing.
Humans aren’t props in each other’s stories; we are participants in the story of God.”
The Bible was indeed written in times and places where the medical innovations of our day and time were inconceivable, but it does appear to me as I read the text and read the news that God’s established wisdom is incontrovertible. Simulating God’s power while rejecting God’s person never ends well, as the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 attests to.
Sesay clearly believes she is doing what is right. I find this very sad, not just because it is self-centred, but because I believe she has been deceived. Later in the interview, it becomes clear that she is capable of significant sacrifice:
“I left CNN because my mum had the stroke… and business decisions were being made which did not align with my responsibility to care for her.”
This is not, as I thought, a simple case of a modern woman who has chosen to make the benefit of others subservient to her own. It is instead the story of a woman who has believed that the greatest good to her and others comes when she prioritises herself, and even her most selfless actions must be understood as a project done in service of her individual desires
“It’s just that at some point you have to put yourself first.”
Much as I strongly disagree with her decision to achieve motherhood in this way, I don’t lament her decision as much as I lament our shared condition of being sinful humans, who with all the will and education in the world, cannot rid ourselves of this nature which means even our most sacrificial endeavours are plagued by a root of selfishness.
If I ever met Isha, I’d hope to share with her not just an additional unsolicited opinion from an overbearing stranger, but instead the liberating gift of self-forgetfulness and actual service which comes with a life lived with Jesus at its centre. We both have African heritage, singleness and tendency to fixate on the self in common. I hope that we might one day share a heavenly Father.
Responding to the culture in which we live
Pride no longer sells
It's Pride month, but you might not have noticed
What are you worth?
Damilola Makinde explores how Christianity and Islam differ in their understanding of human worth
Being Human
Keeping your data secure is very important to us. By providing your personal details you agree to allow the Evangelical Alliance to contact you either on the basis of the consents you have given us or for our Legitimate Interests in accordance with current data protection regulations. We will never make your personal data available for marketing purposes to external individuals or organisations. For more information view our privacy policy or email [email protected].
