I probably wouldn't have read Embryo Culture, a new book on ethics inside a test tube nation, until I read this interview on Salon with author Beth Kohl. I was surprised at how engaging she was and how connected I felt to the reproductive, political and spiritual journey she went on while becoming a mother. It reminded me of a very clear moment when the worlds of assisted reproduction and doing it the old-fashioned way collided on Thursday morning in another mother's living room.
I was sitting in playgroup one week when two of the mommies were talking IVF treatments. I was fascinated and humbled by all they were going through physically and otherwise, by the insider language of IVF and by their very different experiences. I've been privy to many of these conversations simply because I know a lot of women who've turned to assisted reproduction to have biological children. I could very well be one of those women, but I am not.
One of the mommies turned to me and asked how long we tried to conceive before the seeds of Lil E took root. I told her the truth, that to my own surprise, it only took one try.
"Bitch!" she laughed. But it wasn't funny and she wasn't really joking around about whatever physiological or genetic or environmental or just plain old stupid luck got me knocked up on the first go and landed her in a long line at a fertility clinic to get shots at 7 a.m. with 75 other women.
The reason my husband and I decided to go ahead and give pregnancy a try was because a close friend and co-worker had been into the depths of many kinds of shots, procedures, miscarriages and attempts at making a baby that lasted years before she finally had a "successful" pregnancy. It scared me and it scared another close friend and co-worker who also got pregnant on the first try. It felt like a strange twist that our friend's state of well-being and marriage were so battered by infertility and that each of us reacted by quickly getting pregnant.
All of this back story that led to my pregnancy and then future friendships with women engaged in the real work of reproduction has played into my politics. I have been pro-choice as long as I can remember. I grew up in a household where we were not allowed to buy products or pizza by companies that in turn gave money to anti-choice organizations. As my belly grew and from it, emerged a human being, because of whom I met women struggling with what to do with frozen embryos and the possibility of selective abortion, I became even more invested in the freedom for women to make all kinds of reproductive choices. I understand now, though, that it is even deeper and more emotional and more spiritual than a sign scrawled with Sharpie slogans or an issue to check off on a voting ballot or click off in an email of protest to my local representatives.
One thing I see clearer now is that although we may go about becoming and being parents quite differently, we are not divided by the people who conceive in the back of a Suburu Outback and those who do it in stirrups in their doctor's office, those who are filling out applications for adoption and those who are making the very tough decision to have an abortion, those who are holding on to embryos until they can donate them to science and those who are choosing not to pay thousands of dollars to keep them frozen and ferried away, bitches who got pregnant immediately and those who didn't.
I'm not going to say I completely understand each experience or choice; they are not all mine. But I do think we are linked in the reproductive choices we are making simply by making the choices. I don't imagine that every single person does, but I imagine that most people do invest themselves psychologically, spiritually and emotionally as well as physically when they try to become parents. And that is the place where I think there is so much room for conversation, activism and exploration. After all, many of us could easily slide from one category to the next, from fertile to infertile or the other way around in the blink of an eye, slip of an egg or prick of a needle. Beyond the science and reasoning of that possibility, is, as Kohl says, the question of not what we can do but if we do it. And that is a deep well I think we've only just begun to dive into.
