MSM like the NYT and culture mavens like Oprah are enamored of procreation stories that break boundaries. The latest installment, in today’s Magazine, presents a very long article about a couple who paid for eggs and hired two surrogates to gestate two children at the same time so that it would be like having twins. The children are called “twiblings.” It is called very chirpily, the “futuristic insta-family.” I also learned a new term: “gestational carriers,” for the women who rent their uteresi–and breasts for nursing. From “Meet the Twiblings:”
I began researching surrogacy and egg donation — corresponding with gestational carriers on surrogacy Web sites and talking to agencies. The process seemed so daunting and alienating — inviting all these strangers into our bedroom, creating relationships with unknown conventions and risks, giving others extraordinary power. In the story of what happens when a man and a woman love each other very much, they don’t need strangers to lend them their gametes. Having children was one of life’s great acts of self-definition. How could we turn the most intimate thing a couple could do — coupling — into a ménage à trois,à quatre or cinq?
One could ask, what about adoption? That too has become something of a market and bureaucratic impediments, apparently:
I had friends who spent all of their money trying to adopt, only to have things fall through again and again — birth mothers who changed their minds, foreign programs that were discontinued. I researched adoption in China but discovered that the criteria excluded us. When Michael’s parents adopted his sister in the 1970s, there was an abundance of babies in the United States in need of homes, but the widespread use of birth control and abortion, among other factors, has caused the supply of infants available for adoption in the subsequent three decades to plummet to a fraction of what it was then. Knowing that, I was still taken aback by how discouraging one adoption agency was about our prospects for “competing” against other couples. “Most birth mothers do prefer younger women,” the woman informed me. “But you’ll get a letter from your doctor, certifying you are in excellent health for the social worker anyway.”
The gestational carriers even have husbands and children. One wonders whether the experience of watching their mother/wife carry another couple’s child and give them up will impact the family in future years. We are told it is all okay and one of the children wanted to help the woman with the “broken tummy.” But who knows? And does it matter? As long as our couple got what they wanted.
Here’s how the article ends:
Once, there was a couple who wanted to have babies. They tried and tried, but no babies arrived, and they were very sad. But then a Fairy Goddonor brought them some magical eggs. She came from a place where it never rains, and she drove a midnight blue convertible and had long golden hair (well, currently short and aubergine). They took the eggs, and the eggs changed into the beginnings of babies, and they gave them to angel women to help them grow. So the angel women stowed the beginning of each baby in their bodies, where they grew and grew like pumpkins.
Sorry. Like most fairy tales, there’s more to the story than the sweetness and light. With every pushing of the envelope that the media trills over, we are experimenting with society’s most basic institution, not to mention–again–validating procreation as a consumer activity and form of manufacture. And let’s not get into the little pumpkins that end up as medical waste or in cold storage.
There’s not much to be done about it if people refuse to exercise restraint. The law lost its ability to control this field a long time ago. Well off people with a sense of entitlement are going to write big checks to get what they want. Fertility doctors will continue to be fill orders and women who need money are going to continue to rent their most intimate biological functions and parts. But we are a ship steaming full speed ahead into a foggy sea without radar–and that sound you hear are waves breaking on a rocky shore.
January 2nd, 2011 | 8:36 pm
You know, I was reading along, thinking, “that doesn’t sound so bad…” until I got to the fairy tale conclusion and thought, WTF?
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
January 2nd, 2011 at 8:41 pm
safepres: It’s an advocacy piece. That’s what you were supposed to think.
January 2nd, 2011 | 8:46 pm
“Well off people with a sense of entitlement are going to write big checks to get what they want. Fertility doctors will continue to be fill orders and women who need money are going to continue to rent their most intimate biological functions and parts.”
Oh, horrors! There’s capitalism for you. Do you have something against the laws of supply and demand?
January 2nd, 2011 | 9:02 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys. Vince Humphreys said: SHS: New York Times Magazine Lauds Multiple Simultaneous IVF for “Twiblings” http://bit.ly/fnL9Ii #tcot [...]
January 2nd, 2011 | 10:53 pm
I know, but they screwed up the end with all the flowery language and crap. Now I’m thinking, WT[heck]?
January 3rd, 2011 | 2:11 am
HistoryWriter,
There you go proving Wesley’s point. Supply and demand SHOULD apply to only goods and services not children. But thanks to IVF, children are now commodities to be ordered up, bought, sold and bartered.
January 3rd, 2011 | 9:13 am
That’s funny, HistoryWriter, but I thought that liberals were supposed to be dubious about unregulated capitalism, and its corrosive effect on human dignity, reducing people to commodities, etc.
Perhaps we missed your call for the regulation of the laissez-faire IVF industry and the international surrogacy trade.
January 3rd, 2011 | 6:34 pm
In England, there’s a story about “Triplets” born 11 years apart. They were all IVF eggs, two of which were implanted eleven years ago and became two daughters. The rest of the eggs were put in cold storage. Then the parents decided to try one more time, with one egg, which became their third daughter. So there’s a big brouhaha about the “triplets” being born more than a decade apart.
Kids are living, breathing human beings. They aren’t goods. They aren’t something people are entitled to. They’re children, who need stability, love, and nurturing. Treating them like they’re the latest Wii game is heartless.
I feel for people who cannot have children of their own, but not so much that I can forgive them for mucking up a child’s life because of their own demands. We’re getting ridiculous!
January 3rd, 2011 | 7:23 pm
“The law lost its ability to control this field a long time ago.”
No it didn’t! What are you talking about?
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
January 3rd, 2011 at 7:45 pm
John Howard: Even minor state attempts to regulate the field are shouted down by the industry and the offices of legislators filled with crying parents accusing the office holders of not wanting their children to be in the world. They go nowhere.
January 3rd, 2011 | 9:31 pm
Well, maybe we should try something different. Instead of “minor state attempts”, let’s start by finding something big and major to ban, where there aren’t any babies they can hold up, and where the crying parents don’t have any sympathy, and where the industry doesn’t exist, and the researchers agree that it would be unethical. Let’s call for a federal ban on creating people by any means other than the union of a man and a woman’s unmodified sperm and egg. To make it extra easy to pass, package it with federal recognition for same-sex couples in Civil Unions defined as “marriage minus conception rights” and also protect marriage’s right to use the couple’s own genes to attempt to procreate.
That wouldn’t ban this “twiblings” stuff, but by banning stuff that hasn’t been done yet, we can prove that the law does still have the ability to regulate and control the Brave New World. From there, we can work backwards and prohibit sperm and egg donation and surrogacy. All that stuff is unsustainable and depresses everyone.
January 3rd, 2011 | 10:43 pm
[...] thought I had yesterday–but decided not to get into so as to not muddy the waters–when reporting about a NYT Magazine story extolling a couple buying the services of four women–… This couple all but moved heaven and earth to have children, just they way they wanted them. Yet, a [...]
January 4th, 2011 | 3:56 pm
[...] Second Hand Smoke NYT’s Magazine Lauds Multiple Simultaneous IVF for “Twiblings” [...]
January 5th, 2011 | 2:58 pm
Well? Why not do as I suggested? What’s wrong with my proposal?
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
January 5th, 2011 at 4:39 pm
John Howard: At this point, it is pie in the sky. Alas, so is my cloning ban.
January 6th, 2011 | 12:21 pm
But the issue of marriage and proections and federal recognition for same-sex couples is a very live one, so my point is we can help that get resolved by suggesting the Egg and Sperm law as a way to ensure marriage is protected and the slippery slope to the Brave New World is finally stopped at a very important point. I don’t think that’s pie in the sky, I think it would happen very quickly, if only some people made it a serious suggestion, like you, especially.
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