Recently, IVF treatment, surrogacy and other fertility treatments have been a topic of conversation on podcasts I follow. Although I have absolutely no intention (nor opportunity) of having a baby, I am curious. I wondered about things like:
- Why are people choosing this route?
- How much does it cost?
- What is involved?
- Why does it seem like there are more twins now than when I was growing up?
I’ve listened to fertility doctors, women in their 30s who have frozen their eggs or their embryos, women in their 40s who used IVF to have babies, single women who used IVF to have a baby on their own, gay men who used a surrogate and celebrities who used a surrogate.
Here are some of the things I learned.
It is expensive. Insurance may or may not cover the costs. Often it covers only a portion of the costs. Some women have to do self-injections of hormones (and maybe medications?) that stimulate ovulation in order to be able to produce harvestable eggs or embryos.
Surgery may be involved. Artificial insemination can be as simple as using the “turkey baster procedure” to insert donor sperm (use your imagination). In other cases, it involves anesthesia and outpatient surgery to guide the placement of the egg/embryo.
It doesn’t always work. This was one of the bugger surprises to me. Even with the hormones, drugs and surgical interventions, many of the women interviewed talked about having multiple failures to either produce eggs, harvest healthy ones, carry a baby to term, etc. It was disheartening to hear how many of them struggled for months on end to successfully make a baby (On the podcasts, everyone eventually did have a baby. Nobody interviewed anyone who “failed”).
Surrogacy is extraordinary expensive and not to be entered lightly. The only people who had a surrogate mother were decamillionaires. They spent well over $100K to hire a woman to carry their fertilized embryo to term and have a baby for them. They traveled across the country to find a surrogate, paid for all medical treatments, paid the surrogate and paid an agency fee. The three who used a surrogate included: a gay couple of men, a 40 year old celebrity and a 41 year old reporter who had cancer that prevented her from being able to carry a baby.
Personally, whenever I try to imagine myself pregnant, I think I would never do it. But that’s just some abstract philosophical mind game. I cannot offer an empathy here because I have no idea what it feels like to be a woman or to “want a baby”.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ve been reading essays from the book, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum.
The essays were written by professional writers including:
- Women who wanted to have a baby, but didn’t (or couldn’t) due to life circumstances
- Women & men who never wanted a baby
- Women who chose career pursuits instead of being a mother
Through the essays, I’ve realized that some women carry deep scars about failing to find a mate or be a mother. They expresses feelings of guilt, shame and regret that I simply do not have.
As I’ve written before, I always wanted to have kids. In my imaginary perfect life, I would have had two – or maybe three. In my real life, I co-parented two step-kids. At the time, I was convinced it was the same as being a “real parent”.
It wasn’t. But I only know that with hindsight.
It is different. I was one of 3 parenting figures. I had no genetic link to the kids, no proscribed legal authority and was, realistically, much further down the chain of responsibility than their mother or father.
Still, I feel like I had a chance to be a parent – directly for 10 years when the kids lived with us and then distantly for the next 20 years when they lived with their father and eventually became adults.
I was married. I had kids. Been there, done that.
I miss being married. I do not miss being a step-parent.
Sometimes, as I listen how desperately the women who are undergoing IVF want a child, I have to wonder if they’ve really thought about the work, the trade-offs and how they are signing up for a lifetime commitment.
I suspect not.
Just like I did not think about when I met my future wife and accepted the her kids were a part of the package deal. I was young, naive, impulsive and in love.
A friend who is about to get married and wants to have children asked me yesterday if I regretted never having children of my own. I told him without hesitation, “Absolutely not. I am so grateful I don’t have any children now.“
Little kids would be a nightmare for me. I have no desire to give up my time, energy and attention to caring for them.
I like adults. But my experiences with my step-kids as adults were a mix of pleasurable and painful. And costly. No thanks – I won’t be repeating that.
I used to think I’d really enjoy being a grandparent. I’d get to do all the fun stuff with the grandkids and then send them home to their parents for the slog of homework, discipline and crises.
But now that I’m old enough to be a grandparent, I have zero interest in being around kids.
My guess is that in time, IVF costs will decrease and insurance will cover more of it. I suspect it will become the norm for middle class people and not just the wealthy and uber-wealthy.
Poor people, as usual, will be out of luck and only have the option to make babies the way people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.
Women who needed a sperm donor all listed the same criteria – hot looking, tall, and if they were able to select for it, wealthy.
A fertile doctor when asked for her recommendations for sperm donor selection suggested the best thing a woman could do is know about the medical history of the donor, his family and his close relatives. Her reasoning was to avoid a gene pool that had hereditary traits you would want to avoid like sever physical/mental illness, disease, etc.
It is interesting, to say the least.
I have no neat conclusion or summary for this post. Perhaps I will add one in at a later date.
For now, I’m kind of glad that none of these options existed way back when – I might have gotten into major debt trying to make a baby that I didn’t even really want.