In Vitro Veritas - humorous commentary on having a mid-life child - Brief Article

National Review, Dec 31, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

MANY early Americans disliked Christmas. Boston banned it as popish. It was left to New York to discover that the way around these prejudices was not conversion, but secularism, rebuilding the holiday on family and Gemutlichkeit: Washington Irving created Santa Claus out of Dutch tradition and tongue-in-cheek, Clement Moore gave him eight tiny reindeer, and we were on the way to Pokemon stocking stuffers. Whether the season is about children or a Birth, it is appropriate while it passes to think sympathetically of women trying to have children, none harder than those in New York.

Nature's optimum age for human whelping, in terms of plumbing and stamina, is probably about, oh, 17. But maybe Nature doesn't always know what she's doing. You remember yourself at 17; would you trust an infant to such a person? Throw out four years for a woman's college education; add her desire to put all that attainment to use, undistracted by feeding schedules. Add, finally, the elusiveness of men, untrained to be patriarchs and bemused by the last cover of Maxim. By the time a woman finds a potential father and decides to be a mother, she is often in her 40s. At that age, Dante had already been to Paradise and back.

A woman in this predicament can be anywhere, but she is easiest to find in New York, magnet for ambition and fountain of distraction. Once she decides to have a mid-life child, she had better be here, since she will need all the resources of Manhattan-MDs, money -to acquire one.

There are two routes, both passing through frontiers as bleak as the border of Macedonia. One is medical/technical. Organs that were once as willing to receive seed as trout are to swallow lures must now be primed and coaxed. Every method has its joys. Doctors' offices become arenas of humiliation. Do we know your husband's sperm count? Here is Miss February, come back with some specimens. Measurement invades the bedroom: If fertilization takes place at certain internal body temperatures, you become a Weather Channel for two. Or body parts themselves must make foreign expeditions: A mother-to-be submits her eggs for in vitro fertilization, undergoing what doctors are pleased to call a procedure. An operation to take them out, an operation to put them back, and we haven't even gotten to the second month yet.

When the prospective parents themselves cannot do the job, then they must call on others for sperm (William Shockley was a big donor; better check the label before you buy) or eggs. New York is a good place to shop for eggs, because of the number of college girls who need money and have brains (though how bright someone is who is willing to take drugs to stimulate her egg production is another question). Suddenly a simple couple explodes, at least temporarily, into a hippie commune, or a tribe of schismatic Mormons. Anxieties arise about the new auxiliaries: We barely know ourselves, what can we know of these fleeting in-laws? One friend of a friend, going the egg-donor route for the third time, worried that her latest donor had not gone to college. On the other hand, she was an Israeli, so she had been in the army instead: Was that equivalent?

While all these calisthenics are being choreographed, women are vulnerable to memories of teenage struggles with latex and pills to avoid the fate they now seek. They can't avoid seeing underclass girls, pushing strollers past high schools and welfare offices, who got pregnant as easily as the lovers of Zeus.

The other option is to turn to such girls, and adopt. An industry waits to connect New Yorkers with the straying daughters of the heartland. You begin by installing a separate phone line in your apartment (you don't want the call to come while you're reading e-mail). Then you run ads in dozens of Gannett newspapers. If you find a mother, it may be best to send her to Texas to give birth, since decisions to surrender a child there are instantly binding; a friend of mine who adopted from Florida knew that the mother had a year to whisk her child back. If you are Jewish, better soft-pedal it; most unwed parents are Christians. Should any bard of the class struggle decide to analyze these transactions, let him remember that it is a sellers' market. The would- not-be parents always screw an extra five or ten K out of their big- city marks in the home stretch (what are the would-be parents going to do-walk away from the deal?). The New Yorkers always ask about the child's pregnancy: Was there any drinking or smoking during it? The Nebraskans often lie.

But if there is love, more love can spring from even these grim materials. A single woman on the Upper West Side recently brought home a daughter from Siberia-a child of Eskimos-and presented her to society. There were the expected jokes about keeping her in the refrigerator, and feeding her Eskimo pies. Her hair and eyes were jet black. When she nuzzled, she rubbed noses. Fate threw her to a new world before she could crawl. God bless them, every one.