Jennifer Aniston’s big new movie made headlines this week—for flopping. The Switch, a romantic comedy about a forty-year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated, brought in embarrassingly low ticket sales of only $8.4 million on opening weekend. Hollywood reporters have tried to think of all number of reasons for why it flopped so badly, ranging from the myth of lazy August filmgoers to the theory that Aniston is a blockbuster buzzkill.
But the answer may be the story itself. Just four months ago, Jennifer Lopez’s film on the same subject, The Back-up Plan—which came out this week on DVD— opened to a low $12.2 million. As reporters Gregg Kilday and Kim Masters put it, “Artificial insemination, it turns out, is the new box-office poison.”
And they’re right: These movies are failing because the American public doesn’t like to laugh about artificial insemination. It doesn’t strike Americans as either romantic or comedy. Because it isn’t.
There’s something sad about forty-one-year-old Aniston playing the older woman who has no marriage prospects and wants a family. There’s something sad about hearing her say onscreen: “Why wait? I am getting older and my biological clock is ticking. . . . I am in the market for some semen.” There’s something sad about hearing Jennifer Lopez say “Maybe this isn’t how I pictured it. . . . I thought I’d be married with kids by now, but that’s just not happening, so, guess it’s time for my back-up plan!”
What’s sad is that some real, deep aspects of the human experience—such as the realization of one’s aging, the desire for love and family, and the sorrow of lost time—are covered up with chipper confidence that none of these things matter anymore. Age doesn’t matter. Time is never lost.
Love and commitment aren’t necessary; in fact, they’re not even worth seeking. You can start a family all on your own. It’s a Do-It-Yourself Family! The biological bond required to conceive a child—a male’s sperm and a female’s egg—is all you need; you don’t need the metaphysical and the personal bond with another to make a family.
Surely they value love and commitment; they want love and commitment to be an essential part of their relationship with their children, don’t they? Nobody doubts it. But how does one expect these to translate into relationships with their kids if the parent doesn’t value love and commitment in their own lives to start with? It’s one of those questions that isn’t asked and is laughed off.
And they don’t quite pull it off. There’s something gross about hearing the doctor cheerfully tell Lopez, “I have a feeling that you and [sperm donor number] ‘CRM1014’ are going to have beautiful babies together.” There’s something jarringly real when we hear Lopez’s costar Alex O'Loughlin exclaim in horror: “You’re pregnant with some stranger’s child?”
In The Switch, it’s not some stranger’s child, it’s her friend Wally’s child, only she didn’t know he performed “the switch,” exchanging the sperm donor’s semen with his own. As Wally (played by Jason Bateman) later put it, “I hijacked her pregnancy.” “Ohh,” replies his friend Leonard (Jeff Goldblum), in a perfectly delivered line, “that was ill-advised.”
The truth is artificial reproductive technology is ill-advised, and not just because it separates love from family. Biologically, it’s a very bad idea.
Many women who undergo in vitro fertilization suffer the physical effects of unnatural hormonal manipulation before conceiving, and some suffer these effects and never conceive. Many women experience years of unsuccessful attempts, ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, and premature birth, which can result in early death of the child. Many women, when they finally conceive, conceive multiple babies at once, sometimes more than they could healthily bring to term, and have the traumatic experience of having to decide which one of their long-wished-for children they will terminate.
Add all this suffering to the immeasurable emotional pain many women experience for being infertile in the first place. It’s a very hard road.
Further, the health risks to women who donate their eggs are many and are largely undocumented, as the recent documentary Eggsploitation, produced by the Center for Bioethics and Culture, reports. And we haven’t even gotten to the health risks to the child, provided he or she makes it out alive.
Indeed, the child is often the last thing the parent (or parents) thinks about. Many people have become comfortable with the idea of using and discarding embryos in stem-cell research, and, since abortion is legal, many don’t think child deserves protection until the moment he’s left the womb.
Despite all this, many still find something troubling when they hear, as we did this past June, that a number of women who attempt to conceive through IVF choose to abort the very baby they tried to conceive. When we protect babies that are wanted by their mothers, but don’t protect those who are unwanted by their mothers, what do we do when a mother can’t make up her mind?
It’s complicated. Or is it? There’s reason to believe that the thinking on the protection of embryos may be shifting. Just this week, a U.S. district court ruled against federal funds going toward stem-cell research “in which an embryo is destroyed.”
Yet, although artificial reproduction is a life-and-death issue, it is often painted in rosy hues, as a service to women helping make their dreams come true—whether in embryo-donation ads, or in infertility-center ads, or in Celine Dion’s public statements, or in movies like The Switch and The Back-up Plan. The health risks are overlooked, partly out of desire to find a quick solution to infertility, and partly in the name of a philosophy that says a woman should be able to have a family however and whenever she wants.
In reality, artificial reproductive technology is no service to women; it’s not the quick and easy way to get pregnant that it’s promised to be, and it brings more hardships to infertile women along the way. Moreover, it doesn’t heal a woman’s infertility at all. As Dr. Anne Meilnik at the Gianna Center, a Catholic health-care center in New York, has said, it’s covering up the health problems that may be causing her infertility—which can and should be treated—by instead making a child with artificial technology.
For women like the characters Aniston and Lopez play in these recent films, artificial reproductive technology allows them to cover up personal problems that have led to their being single at forty. Lopez’s confidante in The Back-up Plan called her to task saying, you got a sperm donor because “he’s the perfect boyfriend right? He’ll never let you down”; to which Lopez replied, “No, I got a sperm donor because I wanted a baby. I wanted a family.”
In The Switch, Aniston’s artificially conceived child longs for family too. He saves empty photograph frames with stock photos still in place, pretending the men pictured are the father, his uncle, and his grandpa that he doesn’t have. There’s just something about family that cannot be created artificially—a sad truth these films giggle past. Even a child whose father dies before he is born has a real family in a way the artificially conceived child never will.
The Waiting City, a recent Australian film which tells the difficult story of a couple seeking to adopt a child overseas, depicts the trials of infertility much more realistically. It’s far from a romantic comedy. And there are some deep aspects of the human experience—the realization of one’s aging, the desire for love and family, and the sorrow of lost time—that it comes much closer to reaching.
Mary Rose Somarriba is the managing editor of First Things.
RESOURCES:
For more on the effects of IVF on women, see Cheryl Miller’s Blogging Infertility from The New Atlantis; on the women who donate their eggs, see the documentary Eggsploitation; and on the children conceived, see the New York Times article “Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF.”
On women aborting their IVF-conceived children, see “A New Debate Over In Vitro.”
For the recent district court decision, see U.S. Court Rules Against Obama’s Stem Cell Policy.
The Gianna Center.
Elizabeth Marquardt’s “The Kids Are Not All Right.”
Ryan Anderson’s “Reproduction and Public Discourse.”
Comments:
A woman enters the spawning grounds (usually Manhattan or downtown San Francisco), finds a place to lay her eggs (a barstool, along fashionable avenue, or upper East-sid Apartment) . A male of the species comes along, releases his seed, and fertilizes the eggs, and then swims off. They both carry on for a short-time longer until they die or are consumed by bears.
Now, if they had thrown in some space aliens with lots of guns, then it might have made money.
I have to tell you, Chuck and BillyG, this is precisely the person the filmmakers had in mind, their target audience, and she does go to the films made for her target group, BUT NOT THIS ONE. It is truly an exception, and for the reasons Ms. Somarriba gives. My friend, inside a sensitivity that has not been successfully dismissed through therapy, is repelled by the film in staving off the horror the horror her life has become in what she fears is an endless emptiness, an emptiness that can no longer be veiled behind libertine dreams.
So many here think of IVF, donor egg and sperm, etc as a beautiful, benign way to build families. What complete dreck.
She said that when she and her husband were starting IVF, nobody ever discussed the ramifications -- such as "leftover" embryos on ice -- with them. "I love my children, but if I knew then what I know now, I may not have done it."
Unfortunately for Mr. Billy there are studies, that are scientific (this means that they don't base their results on how they're almost positive other people felt one time they met them), which make it abundantly clear that "test tube" babies receive even more anguish from their situation than regularly abandoned children.
60-70% admit to this. I guarantee 10-20% more just want to appear unbothered to avoid feeling weird about their situation. (For a long time I said my parents' divorce didn't bother me because I hated the stereotype of the hurt child in need of therapy sessions, which often seemed a little too satisfying a narrative for the divorcees.)
As a side note, easily 10% of people who have used cocaine will tell you that on the whole it's not so bad!
This article hits the nail on the head about the kind of attitudes that create 99% of our horrific problems.
If you don't believe in gay marriage you can lose your livelihood, if you have sex with multiple men every month a foot from where your children sleep you're simply self actualizing.
If you create and destroy life with the apathy and arrogance of Caligula, you're protected by the full arm of the law...just don't let those people know how their decadent attitudes might cause their children's misery or you could find your ass in jail for harassment!
Or just take BillyG's solution...
"Proposition1: I met some meth addicts once who seemed happy.
Conclusion: Meth use must be just another harmless lifestyle choice!"
For one thing, as Red Velvet notes, masturbation is an evil, not least because no matter why a person might be practicing it, it disconnects sex from its unitive purpose. As much as we tend to stress the evil of disconnecting sex from its procreative purpose, we need to stress this as well.
In a marriage where infertility becomes part of the equation, the danger already, at all times, is that sex becomes *only* about making a baby, and one or both partners begins to feel used by the other as merely an ingredient in the recipe. IVF, in both holding out the promise of a miracle baby -- a promise which it does sometimes, though by no means always, deliver on -- and in setting up a pattern of sexual activity which circumvents intercourse, entrenches that pattern all the more deeply. Again, I don't have statistics, but just as BillyG has "known" some IVF kids who were just fine, I have known marriages which have broken down under the strain of pursuing parenthood this way. Maybe that's incidental to the larger question; maybe it isn't. But it is as much a part of the reality of IVF as anything else.
Re the children of IVF, I don't think anyone thinks that those children, who are now alive, should not be alive. Clearly there is nothing which God cannot turn to His good purposes, and human life is always a testimony to that truth.
My daughter has a friend who, and it's fairly open knowledge, is the result of her mother's affair with a married man. This is a bright, beautiful, talented girl, a blessing to her mother and to all who know her. She has spent a lot of time in my house, and I love her as one of my own. I would never, never say that this child should not be here. Clearly she is, and clearly God wants her to be and has a purpose and plan for her.
Does it follow, then, that the affair which gave her life was not a grave error? Does the goodness of this child's life undo the damage wrought in her birth father's family by his infidelity, or the difficulties her mother has faced in bringing up a child alone? Does it negate, utterly, the pain of knowing that an entire side of her biological family is aware of her existence but will have nothing to do with her?
She is a good, beloved, child and will be, I believe, as "fine" as any child can be in this world. She is known by name and loved by God as any child is, wanted, planned, unwanted, whatever. She is a miracle to her mother. We who know her love her. I am happy every day that she is my child's friend. None of this, however, makes adultery any more right, or more desirable as a cultural norm. None of this makes it any more true that, hey, your way of building a family is . . . just your way of building a family.
Teens have all sorts of movies cater to their demographic. The "action films", the juvenile comedies, such as "The Hangover", etc.
Not all movies want to cater to teens, however.
"The Switch" is not a movie made for teens, it is a movie made for an adult audience, probably in the late-twenties to late-fifties range. In that range are people at the peak of their career earnings; it makes total sense to market movies towards those people with much more expendable income than teenagers.
Look at the current concert industry. Bands form the seventies and eighties are doing much better than contemporary bands, Lady Ga Ga notwithstanding. And that is due to the fact the older demographic, those who were teens in the seventies and eighties, are the ones with the money to spend on such things. And it is those same people the movie "The Switch" caters to. The fact the movie "bores" teens is a non sequiter; they are not the target audience.
So there must be other reasons why this movie, and others like it, fail. And I believe Mary Rose Somarriba fleshes out those exact reasons in a skillful manner.
Forty-some years old, and the realization one has been quite selfish up to this point...such a thing begins to work overtime on the conscience the older we get. And in that sense "The Switch" is painful for many to watch. The movie makes many people look inward, too inward for comfort.
So the movie actually does a good thing; it makes us truly think about a culture that puts self ahead of all else. Of course that was not the aim of the makers of the film. But even a stopped watch is right twice a day.
Most doctors' medical expertise is gleaned from sales literature given to them by drug and medical device company representatives. The ubiquitous consumer-directed advertising coming from these corporations should remind everyone that at least someone is "laughing"---all the way to the bank.
It won’t be long before TV shows aimed mostly at women are...”brought to you by the makers of Ella.” For all intents and purposes, Cialis is essentially the 'official ED medication of ’. You can use a TV ad to convince sleepless people to take your pills, but you can’t portray a person swallowing beer? Once, just a cigar ad sold just a cigar…
..the devolution is being televised.
2375 Research aimed at reducing human sterility is to be encouraged, on condition that it is placed "at the service of the human person, of his inalienable rights, and his true and integral good according to the design and will of God."
2376 Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are GRAVELY IMMORAL. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses' "right to become a father and a mother only through each other."
2377 Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain MORALLY UNACCEPTABLE. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that "entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children." "Under the moral aspect procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not willed as the fruit of the conjugal act, that is to say, of the specific act of the spouses' union . . . . Only respect for the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and respect for the unity of the human being make possible procreation in conformity with the dignity of the person."
2378 A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The "supreme gift of marriage" is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged "right to a child" would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right "to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents," and "the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception."
2379 The Gospel shows that physical sterility is not an absolute evil. Spouses who still suffer from infertility after exhausting LEGITIMATE medical procedures should unite themselves with the Lord's Cross, the source of all spiritual fecundity. They can give expression to their generosity by adopting abandoned children or performing demanding services for others.
Additionally, in order to get the semen, the man must masturbate and often views pornography to "help." These are both grave, mortal sins! How far from the loving, open, gift of self God asks us for in the marital embrace!
“A New Debate Over In Vitro.”
I wish I had the words to describe the comments to the article. Disturbing, chilling and sad just don't cut it. God gave women such a wonderful gift and my gender is spitting on it. Kind of reminds me of how people treat the Eucharist. I will have to give this some more thought as it is too early and I have only had one cup of coffee. I look forward to others comments.