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Liza Mundy |
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Liza Mundy author of Everything Conceivable on the changing face of the human family.
As a journalist for the Washington Post, Slate, and elsewhere, I have always been interested in reproductive technologies and the cultural controversies they inspire. For many years, widely available contraception and safe and legal abortion were the technologies that galvanized liberals and conservatives alike, and contributed to enormous changes in private and public life. In the past twenty years, though, technologies which enable people to have children, as opposed to helping them forestall or delay having children, are driving enormous changes of their own: women conceiving later in life; single mothers using sperm donation; gays and lesbians using IVF to have children together; heterosexual couples conceiving with the help of an egg donor. All of these parents and would-be parents are changing the way we think about the human family and how it can be composed.
Several years ago, I wrote a very controversial article about two deaf women, lesbian partners, who used a deaf sperm donor to conceive deaf children. I also wrote about infertility as experienced by the poor and working class. If you want proof of the far-reaching impact of IVF, just look at the American White House. One of the first domestic policy decisions President Bush had to make was whether to permit federal funding of stem-cell research using excess IVF embryos. Thanks to IVF, we are all being compelled to wrestle anew with the question of when human life truly begins, and what can be done with human life in the earliest stages. Meanwhile, the president and his wife have twin daughters. Meanwhile, the vice-president’s daughter, Mary Cheney, a partnered lesbian, is pregnant via a sperm donor, and her parents are very happy.
While researching the book I worked with scientists involved in IVF in a laboratory, where young scientists were learning cutting-edge assisted reproduction techniques. The most alarming revelation, of many, was the consequences of the explosion in multiple births. So many parents conceiving through IVF end up with twins, triplets or even more. But these babies are far more likely to be born premature, and to suffer from lasting and severe medical problems, and they place a great deal of stress on their parents. I interviewed patients who had suffered so much tragedy and grief as a result of conceiving multiples, and they had not been adequately warned of the dangers involved. When people debate the merits of IVF, they often focus on the spectre of “designer babies,” and ignore the ones that are, you might say, badly designed, owing to having been born part of a set. Thanks to IVF, rates of prematurity, infant mortality, and cerebral palsy are all on the rise, in the U.S. and some other first-world countries. In the United States, this is exacerbated by the fact that IVF is unregulated, and doctors can implant as many embryos as they want. People also ignore, largely, the fact for the first time in human history infertile men can now father infertile sons. Someday, thanks to IVF, we may indeed be able to create genetically modified humans, but right now, more often than most people know, we are overriding evolutionary progress.
As a parent myself, I sympathize, of course, with anybody who wants children and has difficulty having them. I think the public in general can be harsh toward infertility patients, and I don’t share this attitude. These are people working very hard to have children, and social research shows that children of IVF technology are very loved and very wanted. I felt very strongly, starting out — and still feel — that this is the realm that cries out for vigorous, unbiased and thorough and informed reporting. I wanted to present readers with a rich lode of reported information, and let readers make their own judgments, but from a more informed standpoint. I spent a lot of time talking to people, and meeting their children, and talking about the risks and rewards of what these people had gone through to have families. I think about the woman who had a hysterectomy as a result of delivering twins, and who said, “I would do it again in a heartbeat.” I think of how hard most of them had worked to achieve this basic, fundamental human pleasure. Some of the stories that I think about most are the tragedies; the woman who conceived triplets, which were born very prematurely, and who had to deliver three dead and dying babies. That is a heartbreaking story that it’s impossible to forget. But she went on to conceive twins, beautiful girls. And now she and her husband are wrestling what to do with their excess frozen embryos. These are such dramatic personal stories, involving entirely new moral decisions that were, pardon the pun, inconceivable twenty years ago.
