How Much is that Test Tube in the Freezer?

I have been somewhat in absentia here at Planet Waves, having had my surrogate come and speak on my behalf while I have had a very busy past few weeks. I’ve been working with my theater company on developing our new show — a collaboration with our local Planned Parenthood organization. I’ve literally not only had my uterus speak for me, I’ve been inundated with facts, figures and anecdotes on the full spectrum of female reproductive health issues.

So I found it synchronistic while perusing Facebook today to find a New York Times article on parents providing financial assistance to their daughters so that they could afford the expensive process to freeze their eggs while the donor is still young for future fertilization. While reading, it took me a minute to figure out this wasn’t science fiction, but fact. What time is it?

I keep asking the question because we seem to be at a very odd, multi-dimensional relationship with time: we’re fighting to make it slow down, stand still, yet live our lives and take in bytes of information and experiences at a rate a hundred times faster than our parents, and maybe a thousand times faster than our grandparents. And what are we are taking in while trying to slow or supersede the inevitable decay of time?

The reason I ask is because the women interviewed in the story seem relieved by the removal of the biological alarm clock that so pressured them to find a suitable mate to father children. Their parents were equally, if not more so thrilled that they aided their prospects for healthier grandchildren. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Gloria Hayes, who lives in Darien, Conn., bit her tongue for months after hearing about egg freezing, hoping that her daughter Jennifer, a restaurateur in Telluride, Colo., would broach the topic herself.

“I just didn’t feel right approaching her about it, because it’s almost a criticism in a way — ‘You’re getting old’,” Mrs. Hayes said. When Jennifer finally floated the idea, “I was thrilled,” Mrs. Hayes said. “I thought this could just take a lot of the stress off her.”

These are amazing technological times we live in. But this to me is another of what Eric describes as “Atlantean moments,” where our technological advancement is far outstripping our capacity to comprehend its ramifications on our minds, bodies and souls. We are a society struggling to rear the children we now have well enough to succeed in a world that is becoming more closed to them as time goes on.

And let’s talk about stress. We haven’t yet fully questioned why we apply such tremendous pressure on women to become mothers, let alone mothers under wedlock. I am concerned about devaluing women who choose to bypass and outlive their reproductive years without children — who are they in a society that is predicated on a culture centered on the ‘married with family’ ideal?

This one is for all of us to discuss. See you in the comments below.

16 thoughts on “How Much is that Test Tube in the Freezer?”

  1. Very valid point about having a life. My Mum always said to me, take time to live for yourself awhile if you can, find out who you are, where you want to be and who with.Live a bit.

    She had 3 or 4 miscarriages and thought possibly a baby was not going to happen for her. She loved kids, was great with them, trained with handicapped kids.

    A couple of friends. One great with kids, had a couple of abortions because it wasn’t the right time, now at the very limit for having a child of her own, facing that no baby may be her reality. Another friend who finally had a child but ‘wouldn’t have been able to handle it’ if she hadn’t. All sorts of people. Everywhere.

  2. “If folks care about healthy grandchildren, maybe they ought to put their energies into issues of Fukushima radiation that may be an extinction-level event, cell phone towers, microwaves, TSA X-Ray Scanners and GMO Foods, for starters. Maybe they ought to be worried about children in general, not just their own particular genetic line.”

    :::clapping and cheering::: Exactly. Until everyone stops the “me and mine” mentality we will be chained to the stupidity and materialism so rampant today.

  3. “By now, motherhood should not only be a choice (in terms of when or if) but in terms of lifestyle and, if you will, profession. (And I use the term ‘profession’ because raising a child successfully takes at least as much expertise and skill as any other ‘profession’.)”

    I agree. My career choice has been to be a full-time-stay-at-home mother (not implying that working outside the home is part time mothering; it was the staying at home that I do full time but how to phrase it is a dilemma for me). One of my daughters wants to be a film maker and is adamant that she does not want children. My husband and I are fine with that and would be fine if none of our kids had kids. After all, it is THEIR lives we are talking about. Who better to decide that than THEM?

    Not to mention that in my sociology class I learned that the single biggest indicator of an adult’s furure poverty (or not poverty) was if they chose to have and raise children. That’s right, having kids places the person having and raising them at higher risk for poverty than any other single life choice they can make. So if my kids say no to having kids I can see why they might want to live without children; no one wants to fall into poverty especially if it means taking innocent children with them.

  4. Fe, Katie, Pam, Huffy all of you, that post here are great. Hopefully the STFU site might give others a chuckle. Foolishly, valuing education, career, having the right partner, was silly. Financially, I would have been better off now, with child/children/not working, – bonus of not socially excluded/shamed either!

    Quoting Fe: I am concerned about devaluing women who choose to bypass and outlive their reproductive years without children — who are they in a society that is predicated on a culture centered on the ‘married with family’ ideal?

    I would say pitied/and or invisible. Struggling to fill out next of kin on medical forms/discharge papers. Or possibly the shortest obituary you ever read. Definately weary of explaining 😉

    Katie: More Geminis needed – life where existence includes fun & games what could be better?

  5. xoxo:

    Thank you for the Jezebel link. That site is fast becoming my fave go-to on women’s issues. And the Paris journal is stunning. Good words and gorgeous pictures.

  6. No wonder the NYT’s revenues and readership are dropping like a rock. With Internet and alternate media abounding, people are no longer bound and gagged by its limited categorical thinking and uber-materialist gestalt.

    What’s up with their egg/sperm obsession? Is the Old Grey Lady feeling her years? The the newspaper of record previously ran a story about how artificial insemination from decrepit frozen sperm resulted in a child with Cystic Fibrosis. Anyway, I’m still reeling from that unfortunate “Are Women Lazy?” Sunday Times Magazine cover story of yore. Did that woman, or did she not, actually have her thumb stuck in her mouth?

    I always preferred the naughty New York Post and the urbane Wall Street Journal in its pre-Technicolor days. The New York Times invariably left me feeling slimed: its class/race/gender propaganda demeaning and unnerving. And, for some reason, provincial. Anyway, I could never find it on newsstand racks abroad.

    Sad how many people consider “All the News That’s Fit to Print” biblical decree.

    If people really wanted optimal female eggs, and the healthiest infant stock, women would be encouraged to breed in their TEENS, and society would be structured to accommodate that. Teen pregnancy is not an aberration, it is the natural course of things and what Mother Nature intended. However, this society purports to value education and professional accomplishment and status–to say nothing of material advantage–above all. And, as Hitlerian as it sounds, frankly, blue-eyed blonde egg donors from Ivy League schools do very well…as ultimately, those are the characteristics many folks PREFER to pass along to their “offspring”.

    That said, with all the gene splicing and dicing and cloning and marrow-boning going on, to say nothing of the rejuvenating wonders of stem cells, why the scare tactics now about an analog-era biological clock? Anti-aging is science’s new frontier. Doubtless, the answers have ALREADY been found, just not yet shared with the general public. Then again, perhaps that does not jibe with people-as-parasites goals of drastic population reduction.

    Egg rejuvenation may be as simple as Coenzyme Q10, a naturally-occurring enzyme in the body that depletes with age, scientists at the University of Toronto found. “Vitamin rejuvenates old eggs, study shows,” blared the September 21 headline of the Globe and Mail. So maybe the New York Times is just royally miffed at getting scooped.

    If folks care about healthy grandchildren, maybe they ought to put their energies into issues of Fukushima radiation that may be an extinction-level event, cell phone towers, microwaves, TSA X-Ray Scanners and GMO Foods, for starters. Maybe they ought to be worried about children in general, not just their own particular genetic line.

    One of the reasons I so love astrology is that it shows how incredibly diverse people’s basic needs and motivations are. I don’t know how anyone could be a credible counselor without a thorough grasp of it. Yes, Cancerian types are all about kinder, kuche and kirche, and Capricorn might see a trophy wife or husband and properly turned-out children as the right accoutrements to success. But communitarian Aquarians might balk at nuclear family limits, the Piscean might well prefer a monastery, and the ever-questing Sagittarian is off to his/her next gamble or adventure. As for Gemini, well, I don’t wanna grow up…I’m a Toys R Us kid…and so on, and so forth.

    America is a Cancerian nation, however, and therein lies the rub.

  9. Not against choosing not to have children – just let’s not slam those of us who have them and find love and points of meeting there!

  12. Childbearing/rearing. Messy, Exhausting,a Challenge. Again it is just different. Surely a rite of passage. (After a birth you are never the same again). There are other rites of passage.

    I still find BNW with its bottled births shocking. Still think accompaniment is no bad thing whether of the young the old the infirm, or friends or anyone.

    The thread the other day (body issues) made me think how not having a mirror in your face all the time was as liberating for me as giving up the tele. THese days when I catch sight ot myself in the mirror I see the peaceful lines – no longer looking in the mirror to see if I’m ok (sI still look to see if I have egg on my face etc)

    No bad thing to be challenged beyond your capacities from time to time and child rearing is possibly mostly positive? Also the kids tend to reflect your lesser points (another mirror) or be born with qualities that push your buttons.

    Again the question is life about ‘perfection’ or being/becoming real. And what we shut the door on before we’ve experienced it. How industrial our societies are and our rational ‘scientific’ mindset that goes wioth it and all the things that excludes by definition: I fell into Stephen Buhner’s The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth a few weeks ago. What a book.

  13. Great to have you back dear Fe. Aldous Huxley got it totally right in Brave new world, didn’t he!”It’s time for women to stop making motherhood into something so very wonderful and mythical and desirable and fulfilling”. Yes, I totally agree with you Justine. My sister in the UK (who doesn’t have any children but would have loved to),is asked at dinner parties, social events etc firstly what her job is, and secondly if she has any children. Actually, the children question is often the first question they ask these days. It always sends my sister into a tailspin. It’s a status thing, as well. And freezing eggs for a later date also reflects this consumeristic ‘I want it all’ society we live in.

  14. vince:

    I can get where you’re coming from, though I am heartened by the fact that there are gay male couples who are nurturers and who make great parents — parenting shouldn’t belong to one gender alone. So I think we’re pushing against the walls of even the gender-pioneers of these past few decades. It’s anyone’s guess where we’re evolving to, its just that we’re evolving.

    Justine:

    I love your viewpoints and I know many young women now these days who fit what you have described. My one concern is that they know enough not to be bullied into the cultural consciousness that makes them think they need to reproduce to be whole people. There’s still insidious forces out there promulgating what “Sex at Dawn” writers put as the “Marriage Industrial Complex” — the economic and social forces that determine what is “normal”. We need to fight this with ferocious authenticity.

  15. Hi Fe:

    You make many valid points in your post. But there is hope. More and more, I run into young women who (like me) have not the slightest desire to have children and who feel free enough to say such a thing openly. Back in the Seventies (when I was still married), it was not an option to simply announce the fact that you had no intention of having children because you didn’t want to be a parent. But women can and do say such things today, proving that not all of us are being ‘brainwashed’ into motherhood.

    I do feel sorry for those women who so desperately feel a need to have children, as though they will be somehow less than ‘complete’ if they haven’t given birth. Where does this come from? By now, we should be well aware that motherhood is not necessarily a ‘natural’ or essential part of being a woman. By now, motherhood should not only be a choice (in terms of when or if) but in terms of lifestyle and, if you will, profession. (And I use the term ‘profession’ because raising a child successfully takes at least as much expertise and skill as any other ‘profession’.)

    There seem to be several things going on here. First, it is still the custom for women (primarily) to raise children, so girls are ‘inbred’ to see their role as mothers first. I believe that if men were the primary caretakers of children, it would create an entirely different train of thought in girls and their ideas of motherhood (or should I say parenthood?).

    Second, the expectation of parents that they will automatically become grandparents once their daughters are married is just a wee bit arrogant. Such expectations do not take into consideration the wishes of the daughter, her husband, and the life THEY wish to create, and it assumes that the generations of a family will simply go on and on into eternity because that’s the way it’s always been. Hey folks…the times, they are a’changin’.

    Lastly, in the early 2000s, there was a bit of a backlash from married women with children against married women who chose not to have children, and who referred to themselves as ‘child free’ in order to illustrate the fact that they didn’t feel any sense of loss or deprivation because they didn’t have children. The women with children characterized the child-free women as ‘selfish’ (among other epithets), creating a big enough hullabaloo to cause an online journalist to write about it.

    It’s time for women to stop making motherhood into something so very wonderful and mythical and desirable and fulfilling. After reading the story above, my first reaction was that the mothers were simply jealous of the child-free women because the child-free women could still enjoy a life unencumbered by the unending demands of parenthood and the (sometimes negative) changes it creates. But instead of admitting to themselves that there were times when they themselves wished they had never had any children (and that to feel such a thing was perfectly okay), the mothers took out their frustrations on the child-free women.

    It must become acceptable for women to freely express their reservations about becoming parents, and exactly why they have such reservations. Raising children is no bed of roses – it’s messy, inconvenient and extremely time-consuming. It should be acceptable for women to openly express their desire to have a lifestyle that, while including marriage, does not include motherhood because they have other things they want to accomplish in their lives. And women should not have to feel guilty about it.

    Society has accepted the idea of single women adopting children in order to experience the ‘joy of motherhood’ sans husbands. It’s now time for society (and women in particular) to accept the idea of women marrying because they want to share their lives with another adult rather than raising a family.

  16. Maybe this is off subject but here goes… what I don’t get is the baby birth rate among gay couples – both female and male. I thought being gay helped contribute to zero population growth and was a plus to not have offspring. Obviously I’m now old style gay. I also luved how it was a free ride not to go kill strangers in other lands! Color me ‘duh.’

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