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Is It Possible?
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A R8se By Any Other Name
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Standing Corrected
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New World, Not Necessarily Brave
August is the month for conjuring, I think. Every time I mention an issue in passing, it pops up in the newspaper. Every time I think of someone I haven't heard from in a long time, he or she suddenly phones or writes, often with big news (a wedding even- congratulations JC & LS).
Last week I snuck out for a drink with a friend and neighbor who is in the process of adopting a child, and we started talking about what she believes is going to become a big issue in the next decade: children discovering that their parents are not biologically their relatives.
She was referring to people who conceive children through IVF with donated eggs and / or sperm and who decide never to tell their kids about their origins. This impulse, she suggested, seems similar to the now extremely outdated "recommendation" that people not tell adopted children that they were adopted (people are now, by the way, strongly encouraged to talk to children about their biological origins).
That evening, I picked up the mail and flipped through the hefty September issue of Elle magazine that had just arrived, and lo, on page 430 (a plump issue, indeed) was the article "Whose Life Is It, Anyway?" by Nancy Hass. The piece discusses at length whether people (and when I say "people" the magazine usually says "women") should tell their children that they were the product of IVF and donated eggs and / or sperm (again, the article tends to emphasize the donated eggs in question), and tries to explore the psychology of why both men and women would resist revealing the truth.
All of these questions come back, in some sense to women feeling the need to defend themselves as mothers, and in mounting this defense, they may unintentionally hurt the ones they love most. I didn't have IVF or use any donated anything, so it is not really mine to suppose how I would feel were I in that position, but I am struck by how so many facets of this problem are products of shame.
It is astounding to me how easily problems with fertility- and pregnancy generally- mutate into body shame, how there seems always to be a moralizing narrative attached to the difficulty no matter how ludicrous it is to imagine one. It doesn't help to assign fault to infertility, yet people- if not the women themselves, often their families and friends- want to uncover a story with a moral. The awful truth is that often badness simply is, for no good reason at all.
And then there is another kind of shame. So many people keep the fact that they used donated eggs or sperm secret, which is of course their prerogative, but the quietness makes the choice seem lonely and peculiar. Without easy language or models to refer to, the issue makes people defensive and unhappily, this reaction can had negative repercussions, emotionally if not physically on their children.
I'm pointing out this article not because I have any insight or authority, but because I hope that bringing attention to these questions will make them less threatening and that perhaps some clarity will make people feel like the good and careful parents they are, not people living with an invisible secret shame that puts everything happy in jeopardy.
posted by Elise at 11:10 AM
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