Infertility, Adoption, and Women’s Roles as Baby Makers

What is a woman, and does her opinion on it count?

A lot of debate rages about whether women should stay home, do housework, have babies, or “go to work.”

Women are still prodded to take on “traditional” roles (most that never truly existed any more than June Cleaver or Samantha Stevens did) and to settle down. These stereotypes are not based on real people, but on the gender roles that we learn from our own childhood experiences.

Some fear changes more than others. Some people are concerned that women will bolt and abandon men, marriage, faith, and family.

If you waver, you must be anti-God and hate traditional religion. You are disrupting the status quo. You clearly hate men and babies. You are disappointing the potential grandparents. You are selfish and vain.

It is so strange we have this binary presentation of women’s roles. I have met men in “traditional bread-winning roles” and some who are not. They are seldom questioned about their choices. Yet, every woman I have ever met will speak about her job as an earner, her unpaid work as a caregiver, the many reasons that a pay gap affected her life trajectory, and the expectations put upon her to choose motherhood. Most every woman has worked for pay, and for none, too, because it’s not an either/or, it’s a when and where.

My life trajectory was interrupted by infertility. After several tumors, surgeries, IVF treatments, miscarriages, and physical/ mental roller-coasters, we gave up. I went back to graduate school and worked in public schools.

Most women in schools talk about their kids a lot. Women are socialized to talk about their children, compare notes, feel pride, exchange horror stories, and provide feedback to one another about pregnancy, healthcare, home life, and more.

Yet research has shown that whereas people believe having children makes them happy, most people are not happy as a result of having kids. Our culture usually presents children as fulfillment and fantasy, not chaos and challenges.

Especially today, having kids is expensive, time intensive, requires healthcare and is scary in view of climate emergencies, nuclear weapons, and the Sixth Extinction.

The reality of having kids may ultimately be gratifying for some, but the road there is seldom lit by rainbows.

For others, even though they love their kids, they may question whether it is worth the bumpy ride they could never anticipate. They regret timing, place, partner, career loss, physical and mental toll, and lost opportunity. Many people do not anticipate the incompatibility of how their family gets along with new participants that entirely morph the roles of the former couple. They thought they would remain the same people but with added family members. They assumed they would not just love, but really like, and get along perfectly with, the new children.

Even if I were fertile, I would not try to have a child due to the reasons cited above, but also for many more. We were born into a very different world decades ago. The new one does not support the role of pregnancy and motherhood even while it still tries to tell women it’s natural.

The whole planet is no longer natural in the sense that we created a dominating and exploitative globalization that is hierarchical. Few want to see the reality of this. Most people still love the intensely attractive idea of having a family just as it’s been done for generations.

Those past generations, some of which never were as they are painted and presented to us, are gone.

Treatment for infertility would be affordable and consistent in a world where women who desperately want a child seek healthcare and so-called family values.

Sadly, it turns out to be a very limited, for-profit business. Treatment favors the most likely candidates to have the most success. They display not the misses, but the hits ,— baby pictures — when you visit an infertility center.

Adoption is a whole other level of heartache. Having the means, stable home, and desire for a child does not guarantee the birth mother will choose you. As in infertility treatments, the birth mother or surrogate prefers youth and perfect health. The middle-men, the adoption agency and lawyers, just as in fertility clinics, are in a business not a charity.

We unexpectedly ran into racism as well. There are simply more children of color who just happen to be from impoverished places and are “unwanted.” Especially in foster care and globally, these children languish and wait for a forever family. More white families have the means to adopt from a cousin in trouble, or from their own region. People want babies more biologically linked to them, as well.

We want to plan our own lives

Meanwhile, for women who do not want babies, contraception is not free, widely available, and evangelized as a wonderful tool.

It is a wonderful idea, to plan your own family when and where you want!

A culture that claims to want every baby to be wanted, loved, and cared for, should not suffer either of these extremes wherein women have little say. In a more just world, infertility treatment would be healthcare. Contraception and abortions would be healthcare.

Judgment about either should never be socially sanctioned.

It is a radical idea that is pushed down repeatedly: women want to own their own lives for as much agency as a human being can get. A woman may or may not be LGBTQ+, she may be fertile or infertile. It should first and officially, be all her own business.

Since abortion care has always been demonized, there are restrictions coming into play that endanger women who want their pregnancy and those that don’t. There are rules in place for women who want to delay having babies and draconian rules even for those of us who want to have babies but could not.

That an “unborn person” is always of greater value than a girl or women is a frequent idea that is not thought through. Wanted babies have a high cost for the infertile. Unwanted babies have a high cost to overall society, planet, and how we teach people about their value as vessels rather than as human beings.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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