The egg plant and I - negative aspects of implanting embryos in post-menopausal women - Column

National Review, Feb 21, 1994 by Florence King

HAVING a birthday shortly after New Year's is like having the whole world to yourself. The rest of mankind has just staggered off the drag strip known as the "holiday season." They rev up their motors at the first gobble of the Thanksgiving turkey and floor it until the last note of "Auld Lang Syne." Afterward, they're so worn out that the prospect of another fete sends them crawling into the nearest cave, leaving you, lucky Capricorn, alone.

My usual version of dinner is running into the kitchen to gnaw on something, anything, so I can get back to work, but I'm a good cook when I take the time. I was between books and there was no news to grapple with; Troopergate seemed to have died of its own bad timing and Whitewatergate was over my head, so having nothing to do, I took the time.

I was in an upbeat mood as I prepared my birthday dinner of veal scaloppine, parsleyed potatoes, and candied carrots. When everything was done, I set the table with real silver instead of my everyday Delta Airlines cache, put the food in the warmer, and mixed the martinis. Lifting my ice-encrusted, salt-rimmed glass, I sang, "Happy birthday to me," then picked up the newspaper that I hadn't bothered to read earlier. The headline said: "WOMAN, 59, GIVES BIRTH."

I think I eventually ate the dinner but I don't remember doing it. The egg-plant story hurled me into a melancholy funk which I proceeded to drown in gin. It had nothing to do with regret over being childless. My hero has always been Good King Herod; children are seen, heard, nasty, brutish, and short, and if I had any eggs left I would turn them in for guns.

Nor did I stew over the "ethical question." To me, that's the simple part. I oppose the "right" of post-menopausal women to create orphans. Furthermore, although I am an Episcopal agnostic, the lost Roman Catholic that lives in every Episcopalian tells me that aborting female fetuses to harvest their eggs is a mortal sin-- and that's that. Television's sacred goal of "equal time" is neither sacred nor a goal as far as I'm concerned. My blood may be Anglo-Saxon, but when it comes to impartiality I stand with Father Gilhooly of Studs Lonigan-- wipe the floor with 'em, knock 'em into the middle of next week, and God bless all in this house.

WHAT I DID stew over was a melange of things, inchoate emotions and memories that flashed through my brain like heat lightning as I worked my way down to the bottom of the cocktail shaker. Guy de Maupassant defined a writer as one who "looks at the underside of things," and as you know from my last column, my motto is, "Follow the quirk." Combine those with six martinis and you have my disquisition on the egg plant, to wit:

It will destroy that rollicking female imperiousness that has flourished wherever post-menopausal women gather to swap old wives' tales. Be it the Roman gynaecium, the Saxon brydbur, or the Daughters' meeting, without a rousing elegy on "change-of-life babies" none dare call it sisterhood.

A change-of-life baby, as I learned from a childhood spent eavesdropping on my grandmother's unfinished sentences, is always unplanned.

"She thought she was too old, so she didn't bother to . . ."

A change-of-life baby is also an embarrassment.

"She won't set foot out of the house because everybody can just look at her and know that she and her husband still . . ."

Or maybe they don't still.

"They say that last one belongs to . . ."

A change-of-life baby may never get born. By now the Daughters are hitting the sherry bottle, so we hear no-holds-barred stories about "the Woman Who...": the woman who was in labor for two weeks, the woman who split in half, and--so help me-- the woman who died when the fetus kicked a hole in her aging womb, and when the undertaker opened her up, what do you think he found? Two tiny little footprints on her liver.

If the change-of-life baby does get born, several things will happen.

"The older children will be made to tend it, and they'll resent it so much that they'll never want any children of their own."

"It'll go wrong because the parents will be too tired to raise it right." (A problem alluded to by Rose Kennedy in an unguarded moment after Chappaquiddick.)

"It'll be brilliant but not very bright, like those professors who get run over and stab themselves with letter openers."

It may also be "a little funny." Many communities used to have a homosexual nobody could miss, a mauve-decade throwback complete with ascot, lisp, falsetto, and flapping wrist. Nobody persecuted him, however, because old wives' tales work in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. As any blue-haired old lady would tell you, "There's nothing really wrong with him, he's just a change-of-life baby."

Bid farewell to my beloved colorful dowagers. We already have had a figurative menopausing of America wherein problems are regarded as something not to think through but to "cope" with, "handle," and "survive." Now here comes the literal kind.

Miss King's first book, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, has just been reissued in paperback (St. Martin's).