April 25th, 2011
In researching the fertility industry, I came across this old piece by Melanie Thernstrom in the New York Times Magazine. In it,Thernstrom details her long struggle with infertility–the medical regimes, the IVF routines, her attempts at adoption. Finally Thernstrom and her husband decide to employ an egg donor, secure two eggs, have them fertilized through IVF, and then implanted in two separate gestational carriers. It’s quite an ordeal, spanning years and costing at what the author hints at are astronomical sums. (You get the sense the the final tab is somewhere in the scores of thousands of dollars.)
Thernstrom’s journey results in two happy, healthy babies. Which is wonderful, of course.
Throughout her essay, Thernstrom expresses her unhappiness with people who do not both (1) fully approve of her expedition and (2) use all of the terminology that she, herself, prefers. For instance, “surrogate mothers” are “gestational carriers”; the children are “twiblings.” She seems particularly displeased with people who use the term “biological mother” in discussing her children. She insists that her babies have no “biological mother.” Parents can be finicky.
The kicker comes about three quarters of the way through the piece, when she details some unhappiness she with the improper reaction of her nanny.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. Lots of wonderful parents use wonderful nannies and surely there’s nothing wrong with farming out portions of child care.
But it does put the rest of the piece in a slightly different color.
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Such a shame that Melanie seems kinda flaky. Her parents, Steve and Abby Thernstrom, are all kinds of awesome. Seriously, I love those two.
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I think you miss the bigger pt., dearest Jonathan, in focusing on the fact she’s having this disagreement about wet nursing w/ her nanny. By that point in the article, she’s already splashed out for 6 treatments of IVF (which are around $10K a pop), an egg donor (whose services probably cost anywhere between $10K-$50K), and the costs of two pregnancies, with two diffferent surrogates. It just hit you that she’s beyond loaded and perhaps has a skewed perspective on life when you came to the nanny bit? Dude. Anyhooo….Imho, the insistence on what she thinks is proper terminology boils down to is she’s afraid if the lingo doesn’t include her and/or marginalize the contributions of the egg donors/surrogates, etc, she won’t be acknowledged as the babies’ mother.
As a woman who has absolutely zero possibility of having a child naturally, I can simultaneously relate and be repulsed by her idiocy.
Fake Herzog April 25, 2011 at 12:34 pm
Last,
I wanted to read the whole thing, but I couldn’t go on after the first paragraph closed with this:
“When I was 39 and single, I was in northern Uganda, and a woman there asked about my children. I said I didn’t have any, and she solemnly told me that she would pray to God to remove my curse. Instead of shrugging it off, I thanked her. ”
Everything wrong with American women is summarized right there in that quote.