Isn't parenthood supposed to be about raising a kid to be a healthy, happy, independently functioning, contributing member of society? These distorted, egocentric days in Yuppieville, it seems instead to be all about the reproductive process, rather than a far-off endpoint, that bolsters the parent's self esteem. All the issues surrounding having kids -- when, how, and not to mention whether -- focus on the parents' wants and needs, as if they were choosing the car which best projects their self-image.

Here's a woman who, after struggling with health problems that threatened her ability to get pregnant, was able to give birth to a healthy boy at age 40. One would think she would feel extremely fortunate. Instead:

"I had my sense of self-worth tied up with having a 'normal' family," Deborah explained. "You know, the family with two children. It was always this destination to be counted upon. It was what made tolerable all the losses along the way, the surgeries, the ostomy bags, everything. So when this path felt threatened, all those other losses suddenly took on more substance."

...days before the process was to begin, she found herself lying awake nights, frantic over whether she was doing the right thing. "What gets to me is that the three of them would be genetically related," she said, "and I would be the one. . . . It's not about passing on my genes. It's that I don't want to be an outsider in my own family. I don't want to feel less legitimate in my child's eyes."

If not sharing genes somehow makes this woman an "outsider in my own family," than clearly it is about passing on genes. In one sense this woman cannot help but feel this way. She wanted to adopt a second child, but her husband, who claimed he didn't have enough time to spend with the son they already have, insisted that the next child must share his genes. These people are both trapped into their views of what is "normal" reproductively. Do they put as much thought into actually raising these kids?

Before starting our donor cycle, my husband and I met once with a social worker, a standard requirement for couples using donor eggs -- though, again, not for those using donor sperm. Her job wasn't to screen us (she did, after all, work for the clinic and had little incentive to reject anyone) but to help us imagine how the genetic asymmetry might play out.

Do you know why it is not required for sperm donation? Because most men do not freak out about using donors the way that women do (excepting the jerk above who obviously thought his manhood was in jepoardy if the child was not his genetically). Using donated sperm has been common for much longer, so maybe it is just a lag in how used we are to these technologies. But in general, it is women who seem to obsess over these issues, and read deep significance into every possible stage of the reproductive process. One of the most absurd examples I have encountered was a remark made by a woman who had given birth recently by emergency cesarean section. Referring to my own c-section, I was corrected by her: "You should say 'cesarean birth' so that it affirms that you gave birth to the baby." I could only stare open-mouthed. I hauled my kid around in my guts for nine months (most of which time her presence made me miserable), and this woman actually thinks that someone out there thinks I did not really give birth because the baby didn't exit through my vagina? She was in me, and then came out. Even it had been through my nose, I would certainly define that as "birth."

But in a sense perhaps the woman was right. She either said what she did because she is pathetically insecure, or because in her mind a vaginal birth was somehow superior or more valid. My own doctor was needlessly apologetic when he informed me of the necessity of my having a cesarean. I read a parent magazine article that actually discussed making the choice to attempt a vaginal birth of a breech baby as if it were a positive thing.

It is not convincing to suggest that safety due to protection from surgery is an adequate reason for making such a choice. In a western hospital, complications from a cesarean are not much more common than those from vaginal birth. From the baby's perspective, however, it is significantly more dangerous. I am close to someone who was a breech delivery, and became slightly brain-damaged as a result of being choked by her own umbilical cord. Why any mother would put her own desires (this does not include maternal health risks, which are a separate issue) above what is safest for the baby is beyond me. But such desires have fed the growing popularity of giving birth at home (also promoted by articles in the same magazine), and underwater in birthing tubs.

The egg donor article continues:

"People see a child in a supermarket checkout line and almost reflexively make some comment about who he looks like or doesn't look like," said Robert Nachtigall, an adjunct clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-author of the paper. "We interpret it as a kind of shorthand by which people validate the child's position in the family, in society, by basically making comments that refer to the blood relationship that must exist between the child and his or her parents. The problem for people who have conceived with donor gametes is that they know it's not true. And the dilemma for them is how to respond, if at all."...The difference is that there's widespread cultural support for adoption in a way there isn't for donor conception.

So we are supposed to have special sympathy for those who make the choice to spend $40,000 on an ovum rather than a child? Why is it anyone's business in the first place? What happened to smiling and nodding politely? The answer is that they want to make it everyone's business because they have a bizarre need to have their choice "validated" by strangers. If the process of reproduction affects the child's "position in the family, in society" it is a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by constant parental worry. Plenty of adoptive parents have a good laugh when well meaning strangers remark on how their child resembles them. It happens all the time.

Resemblance talk did something else, too: although emphatic that it didn't change their love for their child, mothers said it was a constant reminder of their own infertility.

Granted, there certainly is something biological in people's obsession with fertility. After all, if we did not prefer to raise our own genetic child to raising someone else's, our genes would not get very far. Women may be more easily obsessed with reproduction than men because their investment in children is nearly always much larger than men's (the sole exception being a stay-at-home father of an adopted child). But humans have transcended a lot of base biological urges culturally. Killing is illegal among humans because with our rational brains we can project consequences, and we raise ourselves to a moral standard above what we grant to other animals. Humans also have other ways of leaving a legacy than simply by reproduction. As Stephen Sondheim once pointed out, we gain our immortality through both "children and art." Or an invention. Or a business. A strong biological urge to reproduce genetically should be tempered by the rational knowledge that the successful upbringing of a contributing member of society, carrying our heritage, is more important than whether he or she carries our genes. There are millions of adoptive parents out there who know that their kids are their kids, no matter who gave birth to them. How many abandoned mothers refer to their absent children's fathers as "sperm donors"? How many people want to disown their own rotten (but genetically related) kids?

These angst-ridden women who dwell on such superficial issues should get over themselves, but the truth is that most will not. What we should be concerned about is not how complicated genetic relationships will "play out," but rather that such self-absorbed women are raising kids at all, and for what purpose.

Labels: gender, genetics, health, humans