Why Quayle Has Half a Point

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.