Here we go again. Would you be my baby’s father? Even though you’re a woman.

Sometimes I really do wonder just what the hell is going on in Britain. The Daily Mail (that respected source of common sense and balanced reporting – not) has a headline today claiming the end of fatherhood as we know it.

It seems that a Bill is before parliament which will allow anyone who consents to be named as the “father” on a birth certificate – regardless of gender, genetic relationship to the child or romantic relationship to the mother.

Yes – regardless of gender. That means that a woman could name another woman as father. That may be her lesbian life partner or even her BBF. In fact, they may even go to the extent of replacing the word “father” with “Second Parent”.

So it’s goodbye Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and hallo to “First Parent’s Day” and “Second Parent’s Day”. What the hell kind of crazy mixed up world do we live in?

Okay, so a homosexual couple (of either gender) want to bring up a child as a family unit. That’s fine, as long as both parent’s understand that they need to put the child first. It can’t be any worse that a heterosexual couple who split up after a few years. But the fact remains that, for now, you still need an egg and a sperm to make a baby, and that means you still need a man and a woman in the birth certificate.

The part of this that gets me is that the person named on the certificate need not be genetically related to the baby. But i thought that was supposed to be the whole damn point of the things – to allow tracing of genetic lineage. Okay, so woman may have lied in the past and put their husband’s name when the genetic father was someone else, but to be so open about it as to write into law that genetics are unimportant is preposterous.

Still, the Daily Mail is hardly the most objective publication, and this may be another example of their overreaction to anything and everything that labour does. I’d like to know more about it. I’d like to know the details and get some reassurances that traditional family is not being irrecoverably undermined by this legislation. But, honestly, I don’t think I’ll get either.