Why do people do what they do — as individuals, and as groups? One of the purposes of social science is to discover the unspoken assumptions and unarticulated motivations behind social behavior. One such question I have been thinking about lately is: why do people have children, and what does “having” children mean? So this story got me going.
Reading this story made me irrationally angry: “An I.V.F. Mix-Up, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice.” It’s the story of two embryos accidentally switched at the fertility clinic, so that two women accidentally gestated and birthed someone else’s genetic baby. Going in, everyone involved is apparently healthy and rich enough to afford IVF. They live very close to each other, and when the mistake was confirmed at age three months, they switched babies, remained friends as families (including each family’s older sibling), and everyone seems fine now. Obviously a scary and traumatic experience for the parents, with a remarkably amicable resolution. No one wants to go through this, but if you did, this is how you would want it to turn out. (Maybe IVF clinics should just provide a genetic test confirming genetic parentage, as standard practice.)
I overreacted like this on social media: “SHOCKING, UNBEARABLE, the HORRIBLE THING (actual words in the story). This is all supposed to be sensitive to the people involved, but please spare a tear for the millions of people whose families this negatively categorizes.”
What I felt when I read it was that anybody with adopted children (or anyone involved with surrogacy), was being told in so many ways that their families were unbearable and wrong — that their entire lives were the trauma of unnatural family separation from which they have no hope of fully “recovering.” I further felt that no one in the story, including the author, had any concept of adoption and its ancient history in the human race in many forms. That the assumption of forever-matching between genetic parent and child — as the natural and ideal state of human existence — is more the historical anomaly than is the construction of trauma from separation between genetic parent and child.
After I cooled off a little and read the story again, I think it’s not outrageous but merely clueless. In reply to my outrage, the sociologist Amanda Stevenson wisely replied, “The cruelty we inflict on ourselves by enforcing such narrow notions of family.” That is what I meant.
The possibility that the IVF clinic had implanted the wrong embryo is introduced as “the horrible thing” that the father fervently hopes is not true. He is “walloped by the suspicion that May is not his genetic child.” When they get a DNA test kit to check it out, he is “threatened by its ominous presence on the night stand.” This the stuff of magic, not real life. Lots of parents think families are magical. That’s nice! Their reactions are understandable. But it’s not true. There is no such thing as magic.
They found out about the mistake when the baby was two months old. I’m an expert on families and children. Changing caregivers at that age is fine. Fine in the sense of not even measurably increasing the risks for bad outcomes. Of course, bad outcomes happen for lots of reasons — and any parent would be wise to prepare themselves (reasonably, not obsessively) for things to go sideways in life. But transferring infants between secure, stable, loving, well-resourced environments is not one of them.
And also, think about it. All the research about children moving between caregivers has them ending up parented by people who aren’t their genetic parents. This one is changing caregivers to end up with one’s genetic parents, which removes the possibility of psychological effects of knowing one has been separated from one’s original parents, and the feelings associated with that. Really, what is left here beyond the parent’s reaction?
Of course, the experience was shocking, surprising, and disturbing — this is all to be expected. And the possibility of losing the child as a result of the mix-up was a traumatic thought. If, as they feared, the law generally sides with the genetic parents over the birth parent in such cases, that could be really bad. Luckily, another couple had delivered the baby produced by their embryo, they lived close by — and everyone was able to agree on a solution. Shock, surprise, happy resolution. This is not magic, it’s life.
How dare I use words like “happy” and “fine” and “solution”? Because of science. By the time they were ready to switch families, the reporter Susan Dominus tells us, the babies “were no longer newborns but babies who had, by then, spent three months hearing their siblings laugh, smelling their mothers’ scents, seeing the particular shade of dark that descended in their rooms when night fell.” Right, they were just beginning to emerge as independent organisms, still completely incapable of independent survival, but old enough to open their eyes and be aware of their surroundings, and to manipulate their parents’ emotions to get food. Dominus goes on, “Could the parents now possibly rip them from all the comfort they’d known, in the name of some genetic allegiance?”
Yes, of course they could. This is the point in the story when I first thought, Have any of these people heard of adoption? Have they ever met a child “ripped from all the comfort they’d known” — who grew up healthy and untraumatized?
I think back some 20 years, to when we adopted our first child, and were required by our local government to attend a training by social workers on adoption, which included a guided meditation on how horrible it was for babies to be ripped from all the comfort they have known — focusing, as it happens, on sights and smells (because that’s really all infants know, if they’re lucky). In the event, that training left me extremely unprepared for how unhorrible the experience was in real life. Babies need to be cared for, and the younger they are the more they need this. However, they really are fine if the roster of people caring for them changes. This has been part of the human experience forever — and it took modern parental obsessive overthinking to turn it into a life-altering tragedy. In other words, it’s the parents’ problem, not the children’s — and it’s the parents’ job to protect them from that.
What does the research say? The following paragraph in the story — the ritual journalistic invocation of a single, out-of-context expert, whose contribution doesn’t change the trajectory of the story in any way — is true in its conclusion, but not in its reasoning (and it’s the only mention of adoption):
She and Alexander felt bonded to May, and they felt that she was bonded to them — she knew her name and lit up when they looked into her eyes. But they knew that children who are adopted into loving homes, even at much older ages, are expected to thrive, especially if their early caregivers were nurturing. “It’s a difficult change — but doable,” Beatrice Beebe, a psychology professor at Columbia University’s medical school who studies infant development, told me. “The baby would have to learn a whole new set of patterns, but babies are fantastic learners.”
There is no evidence that changing caregivers at three months is a “difficult change,” at least if we define difficult to mean anything with a lasting negative effect. If you define difficult as “trouble getting to sleep for a few nights” or “resists new routine for a week or two,” I can’t help you — except to say that most parents without IVF mix-ups experience these things with their infants a lot, too. These are parent problems.
For more scientific context to my reaction, here’s an excerpt from a recent, highly cited review:
As mammals, we have evolved to respond well to the marked disruption of being born. Likewise, in the first few months of life there is little evidence that a shift in caregiving arrangements produces detectable adverse effects later in development. Perhaps the best evidence of this comes from studies of children adopted from conditions of deprivation in institutions in the first few months of life. Across a large range of measures, cognitive, social, emotional and physiological, no differences were noted between those children and children born and raised in their birth families (citing this review).
That refers to studies of children who suffer deprivation for a few months before adoption. When adoption occurs very early and there is no deprivation before or after the adoption, there is really no reason to even suspect developmental harm. The paper does make reference to “developmentally-mediated attributions” which can cause psychological difficulties later in life — in other words, people’s reaction to the fact of adoption can cause problems. This is a real risk — one the Times article, if anything, exacerbates — but not one that should affect the families in this story, who end up with their genetic parents.
There are thousands of studies (like this one) of adoption outcomes. If you take the risk factors they measure, remove literally all of them — so that you are looking at early adoption, no drugs or alcohol, no maltreatment, no disruption after adoption, and so on — you’re left with no negative effects. That’s this story, in other words.
There are anecdotes in the story that ellicit appropriate sympathy for the parents and siblings, who had some difficult experiences. And by Dominus’s telling the families behaved admirably, taking advantage of their abundant resources to craft a positive outcome for their children. Which makes the end of the story truly perplexing to me:
She and the other parents all tried to normalize what happened, cheerfully answering questions about who started out in whose belly and why, but they knew that as the children got older, they would have more troubling questions — questions about chance and choice and sacrifice and compromise. The parents might not have the answers to those questions; they would simply say that they did the best they could. Don’t call it a happy ending, the children’s parents would say; it’s not. It’s the happiest ending possible, which is, still, more than they could have hoped for.
Why on earth would you not call this a happy ending — because children will ask difficult questions? Again, parenting. Or because there really is an underlying infant trauma? Again, there isn’t. If I have one piece of parenting advice for these folks (if that is really their view, and not just Dominus’s), it is this: Just tell your kids the truth, and don’t make them live your trauma. That’s not easy advice to follow, of course, but it’s worth a try.
When we were on the bus to pick up the 12-month-old baby we were adopting, in Wuhan, our guide gave us small card with advice for taking care of the baby. It was good advice for easing their transition from the foster care they were accustomed to, like heating up the formula, having a regular sleep routine, and loving the baby. When, on the first night, our baby didn’t like the organic formula we brought from the US, he told us to walk to market down the block and buy anything with a picture of a baby on it. The new formula was a hit. When we got back to the US, a few weeks of once-a-week therapy got us caught up to the US child development chart. We were ready to deploy our extreme privilege to give our child every advantage we could hustle.*
I received an amazing gift from this experience, which was the realization that you can parent happily in a world where all the books and kibitzing about how to do the first year perfectly simply don’t exist, where you have no idea how they slept in the first weeks, or what it was like to hear them laugh for the first time. Those things are no doubt amazing, but they’re like climbing Mount Everest or casual heroin use — super cool things I wish I had experienced, but that I can live without. The important thing is not my euphoria, but that the baby got to experience those things in a loving and nurturing environment, with adequate resources and good care.
I hope we will one day overcome the tendency of magical thinking in favor of a genuine wonder for the reality of children and families.
* I am well aware that there are internationally adopted people — mostly not White and adopted by White parents — who have negative thoughts and feelings about their adoption, and I have no beef with them. But to the extent we can isolate these things, it’s not the change of caregivers that creates the trauma, but losing connection to the culture of their ancestry, and the way they are treated as objects of foreignness, or other racism.
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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License
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