If you asked my parents in 1954 where babies come from, I wager they’d be more likely to believe they were delivered by a stork than what some of the actual answers are today.
In 1954, if a couple was unable to have children of their own or a woman wanted a child without engaging in sex with a man, tough. The only way they could be parents would be to adopt – and that was pretty much not an option for a single person, man or woman. Many couples did, however, to their everlasting joy.
But, in 1978, British researchers announced the birth of Louise Joy Brown, the first person conceived by in vitro fertilization, in which sperm and egg are fertilized outside the egg. In Brown’s case, that was a Petri dish – not, as popularly described, in a test tube.
This breakthrough in assisted reproduction led to others.
Couples who had trouble with fertility or the physical ability to conceive children now could. Women could have sperm implanted from an anonymous donor and bear a child of their own.
Women structurally incapable of carrying a child to term could have a laboratory-fertilized embryo – often frozen – implanted in another woman who could then deliver the baby. Gay couples who wanted to be fathers could do so.
Woman who wanted children but also wanted a career so that they could provide for those kids were able to freeze embryos for a time when they more ready to be mothers.
There were moral questions raised at first. The man who became Pope John Paul I (who died a month after investiture) worried that women could be reduced to becoming “baby factories.” But he also expressed joy for the families that so wanted to bring life into the world that they would try something like this.
In vitro fertilization, though, is not easy, even after 46 years. There’s a high failure rate. There’s a high miscarriage rate. It is an expensive proposition.
As a result, there is a lot of heartbreak.
Adding to it, just this year, were idiot Alabama judges who ruled that frozen embryos are people – and that destroying them, as sometimes needs to be done as part of the process, is akin to murder. It’s part of the extreme right-wing effort to demonize anything that allows a woman to make a choice as to whether they should or shouldn’t have children.
The ruling has led to confusion and dismay among Alabama families just trying to be happy.
My parents would probably be shocked by the idea of in vitro fertilization. But they’d be horrified that anyone who would deny would-be Moms and Dads the joy they experienced from their four children.
SUBJECTISM 