And Baby Makes . . . Two

It’s not exactly the place to look for a revolution.

On a Sunday afternoon in Van Nuys, it’s an Ozzie and Harriet backyard--moms chatting, children playing and wisteria cascading down the arbor. Only one alteration: Ozzie is decidedly missing.

The backyard group is a monthly meeting of a local chapter of Single Mothers by Choice, a national organization of unmarried women who have had or are contemplating having a child on their own, unlocking doors that unmarried women once found tightly bolted. Well-educated, often professional, these are the first daughters of the feminist movement to achieve financial independence and a modicum of power, and they came of age in complicated times.

With nonconventional families on the rise and social stigmas dropping--led by what SMC’s dub Celebrity Motherhood, the single moms like Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell--many women believe that short of the traditional ideal of two loving parents, the healthiest environment for a child is to be wanted, to be reared by adults happy with their own lives and to live in a peaceful household. Many single women of childbearing age are daughters of divorce who have seen firsthand how bowing to conventionality can lead to fragmented and painful lives for kids.

Contrary to common assumptions, of the one in three babies born in the United States to unwed mothers (a term members of this group find outdated and pejorative), 60% are born to women older than 30. According to the Census Bureau, of all children born in 1993, 6.3 million were born to single women, up from 3.7 million in 1983 and only 243,000 in 1960.

“It’s not an insignificant number, certainly,” says Jane Mattes, a single mother of an 18-year-old son and the Manhattan psychologist who started Single Mothers by Choice in her living room in 1981. “And despite what many people would like to think, these kids are doing fine.”

She quotes a recent child development and adjustment study tracking family structure. As expected, never-divorced couples had the most well-adjusted children. Single mothers were second, Mattes says, followed by divorced parents.

The key, Mattes says, is stability. “Loss and disruption of any degree are far more detrimental to children than some sort of abstract or perceived loss. If my son never had a father, there’s no person who left him, no ache, no resentment.”

Her son, Eric, agrees that the father issue “really isn’t a big thing,” and believes he’ll be a good father. “I’ve been given a lot of love by my mom. So I’ll know the most important thing--how to love.”

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Baby makes two does seem romantic. No unwanted relationships, bad marriages or divorces. But single motherhood has a slew of complex issues for women to work through. They’re concerned with their children’s psychological welfare and with the “daddy issue.”

“It’s the one thing I do worry about,” says Linda Eisenberg, 41, a single mom who chose to have her son, Seth, now 5, by artificial insemination. Eisenberg decided in her late 20s that if she hadn’t found her life partner by 35 she would have a child--alone. “Perhaps this is selfish, but I knew I didn’t want to have a relationship with a man simply because he was the father of my child,” she says.

She chose an anonymous donor from one of the dozen or so sperm banks in the Los Angeles area.

Seth is at “the stage now where he’s trying to figure the world out, and I know that day is coming when I’ll have to explain the situation to him. I’ll admit it scares me a little, for him.”

But Eisenberg says she and others have opted for the anonymous donor mainly because of potential custody problems. Today, even if a man agrees to certain scenarios, such as waiving his rights, biological parental rights are strong, binding and potentially overriding in most states if parents want to pursue them.

Even though donor insemination has been available to married couples for 20 years, it’s been available to single women only in the past five years or so, with many gynecologists still frowning on the practice. So single mothers have a fertility choice that’s often confusing to them.

“Initially, I had no problem with the idea of a donor,” says Judith Pearls, 43, who is pregnant with a daughter. “Even so, there are now moments when I think, ‘Lord, there’s an alien inside of me. This might be OK for bees, but for human beings?’ She says the feeling passes quickly and she’s thrilled by her decision. “I give myself a break, because, after all, this is all a bit cutting edge.”

“Sometimes people get through that initial discomfort, and sometimes not,” says Dr. Beth Ary, a fertility specialist in Newport Beach. “If they want a baby, I want them to have that child, and my job is to help them view all the options, and then make the choice most comfortable for them, as individuals.”

“That’s the thing about single motherhood,” says Valerie Jensen, 41, on her fourth round of attempting to conceive by donor insemination. “There’s no encyclopedia on how to approach this. You’re sort of out there on your own, emotionally, and you have to be prepared for a lot of outside, as well as some inner, confusion. Can people be cruel? Sure. But mostly my guess is people will surprise you.”

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“It’s a strange dance these women must dance,” says Jane Bock, who recently completed her USC doctoral thesis on Single Mothers by Choice and heads group counseling sessions for SMC members.

“They’re often perceived by family-values types as quite threatening to the social order. After all, if you really look at it, they’re proving that women, not men, are the dominant, more important factor in reproduction and men are becoming less and less needed in the equation. If you don’t think that threatens a patriarchal society, check it out.”

But Bock found single mothers generally far from radical separatists. “Really, these women are usually highly traditional, family-oriented women,” she says. “They’d not be making the motherhood choice if they weren’t. They just want to love and raise a child as best they can.”

Conservative groups have branded these “Murphy Brown moms” a selfish bunch. Yet others are rethinking the types of questions single mothers are traditionally hit with. Why didn’t she just adopt? Isn’t she contributing to the general breakdown of family life? Wasn’t it a terribly selfish thing to do, bringing a child into the world just to gratify her own needs?

“Those are completely ridiculous statements,” says Erik Himmelsbach, a Manhattan magazine editor who recently wrote an article about his troubles with three stepfathers.

“A single mom presents a child with love, and whoever and however a parent can make a child feel secure, that’s all that matters. My mom never felt secure enough to imagine she could do it on her own, and the result was far less for me. Culturally, marriage might have been easier for her, but not for me.”

As time goes on, he adds, the rule of thumb will be that good parents are good parents, however they come.

“We were in the car a while back,” Eisenberg says, “and Seth and his cousin were in the back in their car seats. Seth asks can we go to the daddy store and buy a daddy. I told him it just isn’t that easy. And he’s singing away, ‘daddy, daddy, daddy,’ and I’m not knowing what to do. So I ask him, ‘Seth, do you have a daddy?’ And he said, ‘No, but I have a mommy! My mommy!’ And I almost had to pull over or I was afraid I was going to hit someone. I was blinded by tears.”

“Someone asked me the other day if I thought this was a good way to raise children,” Mattes says. “And I told her, ‘Well, I guess there are worse things for a child to have than an intelligent, capable, mature, loving mother who wants you desperately.’ ‘