The NZCPR is Dr Muriel Newman’s organization and web site. She has many good thinkers providing opinion pieces. Dr Newman is we believe the only NZ politician who tried to introduce a bill into parliament for a presumption of shared care by both parents after separation; the Labour government’s feminists voted it down because it would threaten women’s DPB entitlement.

We don’t agree with everything Dr Newman and her writers say. However, she has this week written a piece on feminism and sole parenthood that is worth a read.

Here is a response to her article by one of MoMA’s team:

Today Michael Te Kouarehu Kereopa was named as the man charged with murdering 6-month old Gracie McSorley. He was said to be in a ‘brief relationship’ with Gracie’s mother at the time he allegedly murdered this baby. The DPB results in numerous children being exposed to mummy’s one-night- stand guests or other ‘brief relationships’. This damages them emotionally because they keep losing male adult attachment figures, and it places them at high risk of physical and/or sexual abuse. A large proportion of child homicides, serious injuries and sexual assaults are caused by mummies’ boyfriends; a relatively low proportion by children’s own father. The safest environment for children by a long margin is a family with both biological parents.

Where was Gracie’s father? If he had been involved significantly in Gracie’s life he may have provided a strong protective role that prevented this tragedy. But fathers are considered so irrelevant in our feminist era that media have not even mentioned there was one. It’s possible that Gracie’s mother was one of the many women who claim not to know who the father is and don’t nominate one for the birth certificate; that’s all irrelevant for getting the DPB anyway.

Why did Gracies mother leave the baby with this ‘brief relationshp’ man whose character she must not have known, instead of asking Gracie’s father to care for her? Did the DPB help to wreck this child’s family unit as it does so many, or did the DPB encourage this woman to be careless about possible pregnancy, or to plan from the outset to deprive Gracie of a two-parent family? Or did the DPB merely incentivize her to deprive Gracie of a significant relationship with her father because that might reduce her benefit and/or so-called ‘child support’?

So many questions, but all the answers point in the same direction. All the reports, hot air and moving the deck chairs will count for little regarding protecting our children better unless the elephant in the room, sole parenthood, is addressed.