The death of fatherhood?

I have read - well, let me honest, read half of - a book that not only made me uncomfortable, but genuinely scared. The book is Louise Sloan's Knock Yourself Up: No Man? No Problem, which is basically a guide for women to "make babies on their own". Now, people who know me will tell you that you would rarely find more liberal than me, among Africans, especially on women and GLBTQ rights. But even I have been taken aback by this apparent manifesto for the... sidelining of men in the procreation process. I felt quite bigoted to think this after reading Ms Sloan's book, and I felt quite tangled-up. And then - Eureka - I found an article in the Guardian that echoed precisely what I felt. To give people a chance to read the book and decide for themselves, I will not say more about the book; however, I wanted to leave you with a quote from the article that expresses my thoughts most accurately:

Much has been written lately about the commodification of love, and the way consumer culture has inflated our expectations of relationships to an unmanageable degree. We are encouraged to consider partners as wish-list fulfillers and, when they fail to do so, as disposable. The modern premium on autonomy and self-determination does not sit easily with the loosening (rather than lowering) of expectations, the toleration of uncertainty and compromise necessary for sustaining intimacy and providing a platform for parenthood.

But it would concern me greatly if our contemporary trouble with relationships led some women, straight or gay, to excise men from the parenting picture entirely. At the heart of this seems to be a clash between adherence to the norm and choice. In the past, traditional notions of what a family ought to comprise have wrongly prevented many from becoming the loving parents they longed to be. This is not an argument against gay and lesbian parenthood. And a single woman who believes she is emotionally and financially secure enough to raise a child alone ought to have options. But nowadays the ideology of choice is proving just as problematic as that of normativeness in the realm of the family and it is necessary, not retrograde, to interrogate that.