Gimme, Gimme

When we go about having children the way we order a customized car, design a kitchen, or buy a wardrobe, maybe it’s a sign that we should get a pet or stick to inanimate things like cars, clothing, and cuisinarts rather than babies…..’,’

The New York Times has this piece on reducing the chances of multiple births for women who use IVF to become pregnant. Granted, infertility is a very difficult thing to deal with, but it doesn’t follow that we can therefore use any means to achieve what we want – a child, our own child. This article raises some interesting points that deserve consideration. Here are a few:

“Women under 35 make up 44 percent of I.V.F. cycles.”

– That’s a lot of relatively young women. What IVF clinics won’t tell women is that there are natural methods to overcoming many cases of infertility. Dr. Hilger’s Pope Paul VI Institute is a very good place to start. Imagine treating women holistically and integrally – there’s a revolutionary concept.

“But Dr. Sher, whose lab performs this procedure, has encountered the same obstacles as others. He has a very high twin rate, hovering around 60 percent, because although the technique yields a higher success rate, women are refusing to have just one embryo implanted.” [emphasis mine]

– It’s all about the baby, right? Yet people are willing to allow numerous embyros to die in the process of getting a “baby.” Remember, that embryo is its own unique entity with it own DNA. It’s not a clump of cells that will grow into a bit of hair or bone or any other isolated matter. Unimpeded, it will become the “baby” desperately desired by some. It will continue to become the screaming toddler, the morose teenager, the college graduate, the young spouse, and so on.

“Many women in fertility treatment say that they simply do not view having twins as a risky situation and that they are willing, if not eager, to have them to speed the completion of their family, to avoid the high costs of future I.V.F. cycles or to ensure that their child has a sibling, among other reasons.”

– [“And I’ll have one of those, and one of those, and that one, and that one, and one of those in every color, and….”] Sorry, not to trivialize infertility,  but this sounds ridiculous. Only in a culture that has lost the sense of what gifts are (think of those endless registries for every occasion besides getting married; think of how acceptable it has become to buy gifts for ourselves or to select the gifts that other people will “give” us) would be so blind as to realize that we lose what it means for a child to be a gift. This is about having a baby my way, when and how I want it, without thought even for the well being of the baby that I want. Because, after all, I want it.

“And many people just see the adorable twins cooing in the double strollers crisscrossing Central Park — not the ones that do not make it out of neonatal intensive care — or the vanishing twin, a fetus that was eliminated in a medical procedure called a reduction to improve the chance of survival for the remaining fetus or fetuses.”

– Need I say more? It’s about getting what we want, no matter the cost to others.

“Despite her pregnancy loss, she said, ‘With all the hard work I put into getting pregnant, I’d just rather have a set of twins than a singleton.'”

– Well, that’s one way of looking at it.

Again, I don’t intend to belittle infertility in any way. My only point is that maybe there are some good reasons for rethinking IVF. A friend of mine, faced with infertility, was ready to adopt. Her husband was completely opposed. But my friend reasoned, “Whether I have the baby or someone else does, there’s no guarantee that he will be good, honest, intelligent, good looking, whatever.” Even with all the choices that IVF offers, there are no guarantees of this kind. In the meantime, there are children who already exist and need homes. What about helping out one of them? Granted, it won’t happen on our terms, but do we really think that having a baby on our terms with IVF will mean that everything will continue to be on our terms after that? That wouldn’t really be life, would it?

Click here for the article.