The New York Times article KJ refers to here is headlined “Building a Baby” and is part of a larger series the Times is calling “Made to Order.” The lede for this particularly installment begins, “Unable to have a baby of her own, Amy Kehoe became her own general contractor to manufacture one.” Later we learn how Kehoe “put together her creation.”

I understand the temptation to frame stores about reproductive technology in terms of assembly lines and industrial manufacturing; I’ve probably done it myself. I can’t think of a book I’ve read on reproduction and biotechnology that does not fall into the hackneyed and vaguely dystopic use of that particular vocabulary. But in the end, how illuminating is it? It’s a lexicon meant to evoke alienation and objectification. It’s baby as configure-to-order Dell computer. Yet reading the article or any number of similar articles on this topic, one does not get the impression that the relationship between parent and child is that of consumer and consumer product. The problem, as told by the Times reporter, is not a lack of parent-child bonding. It’s very nearly the opposite: too many parties claiming a legal right—and an emotional attachment—to the same child.

I can’t really argue with the claim that babies are “manufactured.” But if the Kehoe kid was manufactured, so were you; so was everyone you know. We could declare that your mom “contracted” with your dad, I suppose, and obtained his genetic material in return for any number of wifely services, but that Vulcanesque diction seems to obscure more emotional truth than it reveals. Kehoe’s relationship to the surrogate mother she hired, who now has custody of the twins she originally promised to Kehoe, is not a disinterested, contractual one. It’s angry and tortured. Kehoe thinks this woman stole her children. Again, the assembly-line metaphor is not particularly illuminating here. No one feels this wronged by the guy who puts together a made-to-order couch and then refuses to relinquish it.

Part of the impetus to describe these relationships as new and frighteningly alienated comes, I think, from the misperception that until recently the process of having a baby has been entirely separate from the market economy. And there is undeniably something new about the buying and selling of ova among former strangers. But for as long as childbirth has involved medical professionals, the “creation” of a child has been a group endeavor including parties both paid and unpaid. New technologies create the possibility of new relationships. As those relationships—egg donor and intended mother, sperm donor and surrogate mother—become normalized, the pattern I see is less one of alienation than adaptation.

Tags: egg donation, motherhood, surrogacy

There’s a slide show up on Esquire.com today called “10 Marriages That Survived the Decade Better Than Tiger’s,” and I think it’s partially intended to be a sincere attempt at an uplifting counterpoint to the bad rap the Tiger Woods saga gives conjugal life. Of course, the majority of the 10 couples featured are celebrities—the Clintons, Jay-Z and Beyonce—i.e., the most unlikely candidates for monogamy to begin with. Then there’s Pam and Jim of The Office (Really? Esquire can’t even find ten whole non-fictionalized pairings?) and Trista and Ryan of Bachelor fame (who, remember, received a fat paycheck for their televised vows). Also on the list: Vili Fualaau and Mary Kay Letourneau, the couple who began their love affair when Vili was a 12-year-old student and Mary his thirtysomething teacher (they tied the knot after Mary finished up her seven-year sentence as a sex offender). By these examples, it seems like your best bet for attaining the blissful, shared life is if you're 1) part of a fictional couple, 2) an exhibitionist without a shame gene, or 3) totally messed in the head. Awesome.

Of course that’s not how it is. Or at least I hope it’s not. But it seems like the only views of marriage that the media affords us are either fearmongering service pieces in favor of it (Examples: Marry Him! and, uh, every romantic comedy) or fearmongering pieces about the overwhelming difficulty and hardship of it. Case in point: articles that view marriages in terms of “survival” like the slide show above. And in either case, marriage is positioned more as a social imperative than an activity worth undertaking for actual enjoyment. The confluence of the two views is the basic idea behind every Apatow movie ever made—marriage is going to be real sucky and probably no fun (and in Apatow’s oeuvre, it’s because women are no fun), but it’s just what you have to do for some reason, you know, instead of smoking pot and masturbating to Internet porn for the rest of your life. I’m stepping on my soapbox a bit here—but I'd really like to see an article/movie/book that simply depicts marriage as something two people do because it’s fun and because they want to, and, more importantly, something that doesn't choke them within an inch of life 10 years later. Something that doesn't require survival.

So, on that: Does someone want to buy the film rights to my parents’ lovely union?

Tags: esquire, marriage, survival, tiger woods

Mary Lou Hartman, a documentary filmmaker, had a compelling piece in the Washington Post this weekend about how her own rape a few years ago has propelled her to activism on behalf of women in the Congo, where violating women’s bodies in the most horrifying ways is a daily atrocity. The war in Congo has been going on for years, largely under the radar of the rest of the world. Hartman and a story in today’s New York Times describe the daily maiming of body and psyche Congolese women are enduring. It is courageous of Hartman to expose her own trauma and use it to help these forgotten women. Her op-ed recommends action we can talk to keep Congolese criminals from profiting from selling stolen minerals and groups we can support to help women heal. This time of year particularly we should be grateful that women’s struggles in the West are not about our bodies as a tool of war.

Tags: Democratic Republic of Congo, Rape

There are no heroes in yesterday's NYT story about "Building Babies," and there no villains, but there also didn't seem to be any easy calls to be made about who should or shouldn't be parenting the children created by the surrogacy arrangements in the cases profiled. One surrogate mother was able to remove the twins she bore from the couple who paid for the sperm and egg donations as well as the implantation procedure. Another has gained partial custody to twins she bore for her brother using his partner's sperm. In another case, it's child welfare authorities, rather than a surrogate, who are concerned that a man who arranged the birth of another set of twins by donations and surrogacy isn't a capable parent.

The question at the bottom of the first two cases is whether or not a contract to bear a child by surrogacy is enforceable, or should be. The third case is a question of whether the person who arranges a surrogate birth is automatically a parent—what rights does he or she have, and how difficult should they be to terminate? The one thing that stands out here, even amidst reasonably unbiased reporting, is that none of these cases can possibly be easy calls. If the man who arranged the birth of twins was clearly incapable of parenting them, it would be possible to terminate any and all rights he had to any children, no matter how he was or wasn't biologically related to them. If, in either of the other cases, it was obvious which set of competing parental figures should triumph, it's not likely they'd be news.

The fact that courts in Michigan might reach a different decision than courts in California might seem to argue for the creation of some uniform law concerning surrogacy, but some relationships are difficult, if not impossible, to legislate into black and white. Courts remain unsure what rights a "arranging" parents have to a child created through donation and surrogacy or a surrogate mother with no biological relationship has to the child she bore for good reason—society isn't terribly clear on that, either, and there are no easy answers. But if we try to impose simpler solutions over complex issues before they're fully worked through, the result will be cases like those of the nonbiological fathers profiled by the NYT Magazine several weeks ago—courts and judges who want to find and do the right thing, hampered by laws that interfere with their ability to do so.

The standard in any case where a child is involved centers around the welfare of the child, not the parent, whether biological, surrogate, adoptive, or otherwise. Concerned judges and advocates should stay free to consider every factor in deciding who will raise the children created when unusual surrogacy arrangements go wrong, at least until the dust settles around the questions. If a surrogacy contract is legislatively enforceable or unenforceable, we may be taking away a court's best chance to make a difficult case turn out right.

Tags: parenting, surrogacy

Thanks, Phoebe Connelly, for speaking sense on this Jenny Sanford worship train: "It’s troubling to think that ... we’d pick a feminist icon for the simple fact that she left a bad marriage." I'm continually amazed by folks—usually folks who know nothing about feminism or actively hate it—who insist that putting a lock on the genitalia of married men should be feminist priority No. 1, as if a world that still has rape, domestic violence, forced pregnancy, unequal pay, and other major social problems for women should be put the back burner because men cheat. It goes without saying that women cheat, too. I fail to see why feminism should concern itself with the one issue where men and women are pretty much in the same boat and exert a large amount of control over their futures when it happens to them.

Oh sure, I'd be the first to say that cheating isn't a complete equal opportunity offense, or completely apolitical. Men probably still do it more than women, and probably for the most obvious reason, which is that they still have more freedom to leave a bad marriage than women do. But if feminists concentrate on achieving equality for women, the problem of men who feel entitled to cheat on long-suffering, trapped wives will take care of itself, because those women will get to walk away. The feminist achievement of widespread, no-fault divorce probably did more to make men honest than any amount of moralizing ever could. Of course, it didn't stop all cheating for all time, but that's no matter to feminists. Unlike the other major issues that ruin marriages—fights over housework, child care, money, power in the house—cheating is an area where women give as good as they get.

This feminist's perspective on the Sanford debacle is that it was the Sanford marriage and not the cheating that is the real offense against feminist values. The Sanford marriage, from their own statements, seems to be something straight out of feminists' worst nightmares about the anti-feminist agenda for marriage: a loveless, bloodless coupling created out of duty, between a man and a woman who find passionate love across the genders to make about as much sense as passionate love across species. That's why I found Mark Sanford's affair so amusing, because it appears that it was the first time that it occurred to him that a woman could be intellectually stimulating and appealing as a full person, something more than someone to run his house, bear his children, and stand by him to reassure voters of his all-American masculine bona fides. There are no feminist heroes in this situation, but a little feminist gloating seems appropriate.

Tags: mark sanford affair