all the little babies

As all three of my readers (hello, friends!) are already aware, someone in my family (we'll call her Hannah) has been trying to get pregnant for a couple years without success. She has done IUIs, she has done multiple egg retrievals for IVF. The only time she actually got pregnant was the old fashioned way, with her now ex-boyfriend. She lost that baby. She is still trying, now single. 

This situation is complicated for me and I have a lot of feelings about it, none of which are helpful since my feelings make no difference to Hannah. But the saga has given me a lot of opportunities to think about what it means to create a human being. Making a person (twice!) will forever be the coolest thing I've done. The fact that people create other people all the time doesn't make it any less amazing to me.

And for being the coolest thing I have ever done it was astonishingly simple. I had sex, and then nine-ish months and some physical discomfort later, I had a baby. I didn't track anything or eat anything or prepare myself in any way for the important business of conception. 

And I did absolutely nothing to make the baby. The feet and the eyes and the brain were created without my knowledge or input! To this day I look at my children and I am amazed. Where did they come from? It can't possibly be me. I didn't even try. 

My experience, which is how most people in the world are made, seems to be the antithesis of fertility treatments. People try and try and try for years. This is obviously deeply unfair. Why should it be so easy for me and so difficult for Hannah? 

Freddie DeBoer recently wrote about his own experience with fertility treatments and I was struck by his description of how it changed his views on abortion: 

"Before [IVF] I saw abortion rights as merely a matter of individual autonomy, which of course is still the core issue; the only question one must answer, to know where they stand on abortion, is “Who owns the human body?” But now I also think that abortion is, ultimately, a reflection of nature, of the nature God made. It’s a reminder that there is something fickle at the heart of our most basic animal reality, and the chaos of human desires is not some unfortunate mistake but rather a reflection of the fact that we are nature and are in nature."

I disagree with this — while abortion may mimic miscarriages in nature, it is not the same or morally equivalent. But do agree that there is something deeply fickle at the heart of our most basic animal reality. We don't like to think about this too much because it means we are less in control that we think. Most of the reason I hated being pregnant was that it made me feel like an animal, and I was right — pregnancy is an essential animal experience. No reason is required. 

Of course, until recently, there was little remedy for nature. If you had sex and didn't make a baby, there was no baby. If you had sex and did make a baby, there was a baby. Now we can get rid of babies we don't want and create those we do. I don't know what to think about this. I don't think it's simply good or bad. But I do think it will get easier. Perhaps Aldous Huxley was right and our grandchildren will be created and gestated in a lab. 

I think Hannah will be able to get what she wants eventually, even if she ends up pregnant with a baby who is entirely unrelated to her. I wonder if that reflection of nature will satisfy her human desires?