Things We Control (Or “Why Don’t You Just Adopt?”)

If you’ve never been infertile, you simply can’t comprehend the unique pain and anguished complexity that comes every month, like a bill in the mail you don’t have the emotional currency to pay.   So women struggling through fertility treatments frequently confide in friends who simply don’t understand. There are smiles and understanding nods as the months pass and the money is spent, masking the unspoken question.

“Why don’t you just adopt?”

This is the rudest question you can ask a woman struggling through infertility, according to most magazines, etiquette experts, and common sense.

However, when Ruth Padawer chronicled the surge of twin killings (or “reductions,” to use abortion industry lingo) in the New York Times, fertility treatments are once again being critically examined.  The article details the extreme measures to which couples resort in order to conceive – one 45 year old spent six years in fertility treatments. When the doctor implanted several “fertilized eggs,” she became pregnant with twins.  However, she didn’t want to have twins.  When she asked a doctor to insert a needle into her abdomen, aiming at one of the unborn babies in order to “reduce” it, she rationalized her decision:

“…we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice,” she told the NYT.  “The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

Get that?  Another thing we control.

Read why fertility treatment and the excess production of children does, finally, ask one to evaluate whether trying to have life on your own terms is the best way to go.

It’s time to bring, “Why don’t you just adopt?” out of the closet.  Read more here.