Her Body, My Baby

This is an interesting NYT article written by a woman who hired a surrogate to bear her child. After multiple failed IVFs and devastating miscarriages over the course of 5 years, she and her husband decided to try the option of a surrogate to carry a baby that would be genetically theirs. It worked, and the author is now the mother of a baby boy.

There are some irritating things about this article that are typical of NYT articles in general. The author is wealthy and takes for granted options that are closed to most people in the U.S. The photographs paint a more disturbing picture than what we see in the article itself; the surrogate, barefoot on a dilapidated porch; the author, prim and proper with her baby boy, standing in front of her impressive estate while her Black "baby nurse" hovers in the background; these images highlight the undiscussed issues of class and privilege that permeate most NYT articles. The author explores a scenario that most people cannot relate to because most people cannot even fathom affording more than 100K to have a biological baby.

I think I've written before that infertility gave me the gift of learning how to reserve judgment. It's hard to imagine that I would have hired a gestational surrogate, but what do I know? I was lucky and never had to face that situation. The things that I did ultimately do in order to have children, the painful shots, the carcinogenic drugs, the humiliating exams, the mounting medical bills, those are all things that I'd once sworn I would never, ever do. I would never go off the deep end like that just to have a child. It's so easy to pass judgment on people who do things like that, to swear that you'd never do those things, when you don't have to walk in those shoes. It's humbling to get yourself stuck in a hellish situation, mired in sadness and anger and jealousy, and then finally consider the kinds of things you'd previously mocked.

The comments to this piece are judgmental (and sometimes cruel). For instance:

That smug cow. If she doesn't have a big enough heart to love a baby that wasn't "genetically" hers, then she never should have been allowed custody of a child in the first place.

And:

I guess there were no children who needed adoption in her state.

I'd like to point out that just like IVF, most adoptions are an option only for those with generous financial resources. Adoptions run anywhere from 20K to 45K. In addition, adoptions can be time consuming. When Jake and I were considering it, the local agency let me know that the average wait time in our state is 2 years. That's after your home study is completed, after you've filled out reams of paperwork in triplicate, after you've been subjected to interviews and financial interrogations, after you've written up your profile. International adoptions can take even longer. For a woman like me, one who is super old, yo, these wait times are everything. I didn't want to be too old to be able to chase my kids around the park. (Hmm. Maybe too late. Fortunately Jake is young).

There is no "just" about adopting. That doesn't mean it isn't a wonderful, worthwhile option to consider. It is. But it's not simple, and it's not cheap, and it's not fast. I couldn't help but notice that when Jake and I were struggling to have a family, the people who suggested that we "just adopt" hadn't actually, you know, adopted themselves. They'd had biological kids, and somehow thought that it was the job of the infertile to save the world.

The days of Little Orphan Annie are over. If somebody had told us, when we were struggling to have a family, that I could adopt a baby tomorrow, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I didn't care about DNA, I cared about having a child. I didn't do IVF because I was some selfish, narcissistic person who couldn't love a baby not genetically related to me. I did it because I looked at the options and chose the one that seemed likely to be the fastest and the cheapest. Of course, if it doesn't work the first time (or the second), that sucks and you have to reassess, as we did, but still, we took the path of least resistance.

And I was lucky, because we did have the resources to pull it off. I was also lucky because, in the end, it worked. And maybe this is selfish, but I wanted to know what it was like to carry a baby and to give birth. Okay, that is definitely selfish. In fact I've yet to hear anybody provide an unselfish reason for deciding to have a baby. It's an inherently selfish act. It's just that the people who suffer for it, who sacrifice everything to do it, are the only ones who are labeled selfish.