Why Quayle Has Half a Point

By MARGARET CARLSON

WHEN LAST WE SAW BABY BROWN'S FATHER, IT WAS shortly after conception and well before birth. He's off now saving the rain forest, having opted out of Lamaze class and changing diapers. He may come back, but the show's premise is built around the notion that a woman who has made it in a man's world without one should be lionized for doing so alone through the "terrible twos" and beyond. The lack of a dad is not accidental but a running-joke opportunity. For the successful, glamorous woman who has everything: Now, live from Hollywood, your very own baby, father optional.

There is nothing new about having babies without getting married. What's new is society's attitude, which has gone from punishing it, to tolerating it, to celebrating it. Ah, Murphy, she is too darn busy and successful to have a baby the old-fashioned way, and anyhow, men are jerks. With her high income, Brown seems a poor vehicle for examining the problem of children born without fathers. Yet she has more in common with the inner-city teenager than we might think. The 14-year-old gets pregnant as a way to give her life meaning. Murphy Brown and fortyish women like her want a tiny version of their nearly perfect selves to give their lives more meaning.

Among other things, being a Murphy Mom means having postponed childbirth until your salary has reached the upper brackets and you have sufficient disposable income to employ a full-time muralist and buy enough Scandinavian furniture to induce existential dread. But even at the upper end, where the career track is fast and the dress code is for success, there can come the nagging feeling that this might not be all there is. By then, of course, the flexibility to tolerate a big lug leaving his dirty socks on the floor and the luxury of having time to find one are both in short supply. It takes a tiny leap for those accustomed to satisfying every whim to see a baby as one more choice. It is a way to turn a life-style into a life in nine months.

Babies also fit into the new stay-at-home-but-keep-a-Range-Rover-in-the- garag e mentality. Shopping for the Bloomie's Baby layette has replaced comparing the $400 Gaggia cappuccino maker to the Braun. People who own fish poachers now wonder what in the world they were thinking of. To judge by fat and glossy Child magazine, the Vogue of the play-date set, cloning oneself opens up a whole new buying opportunity.

But single pregnancy (as opposed to those single-mother households where the father remains active in the child's life) is not necessarily glamorous for ! the child, even at the upper-economic end. Has anyone ever met a child happy not to know who his father is? In the projects, the boy with a father is king. In the wider world, children may go astray and end up being moral relativists, but in their formative years, they adhere to a code of conduct more traditional than the decor at Williamsburg, Va.

I know three women, all of them well meaning but as self-absorbed as the rest of their generation, who find themselves overwhelmed by the yearning for a baby. In the past few years, they have come to see life without a child like the world beyond the Hudson River in the famous Saul Steinberg poster about New York City. It hardly exists. Adoption is an option, of course, but that is not the way of some baby boomers. They want happiness now -- on their own terms -- and if they have to steal from the next generation to have it, they will.

Single pregnancy commingles the worst of the Me decade -- let's have more of Me -- with feminism, which seeks to make it as much a woman's as a man's world. Nowhere do men have more of an edge than in being able to marry women 60 years their junior and still reproduce themselves. Unfortunately, there is no legislation to correct this injustice.

It is hypocritical for Dan Quayle to denounce single motherhood on one hand and abortion on the other. But he does have a point: having both a mother and a father is not some Republican affectation but an ideal to strive for. Coming into the world with one parent is a handicap, no matter how mature and moneyed the mother may be. Just because fatherhood can be reduced to 20 seconds, or dispensed with altogether by tapping into Nobel-prizewinner sperm banks, does not mean it should be. Imagine if men decided that motherhood was equally expendable. Sated with their corner offices and home gyms, guys of a certain age could go around paying women to have babies for them. The howl of feminists over such selfish, macho pigs could tie up talk-radio lines for years. Fatherhood may take moments, motherhood nine months, but doing it right takes the lifelong commitment of both parents.

Mothers, single and otherwise, are heroic in the ways, large and small, they make up to their children for absent, negligent or destructive fathers. Children can thrive in many circumstances. But there is a danger in the current attitude that plays down the deficit with which a child enters the world with half a family and that places a woman's self-fulfillment first. Hard as it is to hear the biological clock ticking and not be able to do anything about it, gratifying the yearning to have a child is not the same as satisfying the other indexes of having it all. Some yearnings in life go unfulfilled. What is socially and emotionally acceptable to a woman may not be so to a child purposefully brought into the world with a hole at the center of his life where a father would be.