IVF Has Democratized Reproduction

I asked a friend, an unmarried, childless guy in his early thirties, what he thought about the 60 year-old New Jersey woman who had twins a couple of weeks ago. He paused, mumbled, gathering his thoughts. "You probably want me to laud the science that makes this possible," he said, knowing how keen I am for the ways in which IVF has democratized reproduction. Its development has allowed same-sex couples, singles, and people with physical limitations to become biological parents. It has enabled otherwise infertile people, someone like me, to have kids. "But this one feels queasily wrong," he said. He talked about seeing a grandmotherly-looking pregnant woman walking around town last summer. She had short gray hair, those flat-topped half-glasses suspended by a chain around her neck, and she was extremely pregnant. I probed to make sure he wasn't mistaking a bloated abdomen for extreme pregnancy. He said he was sure -- he is a massage therapist, after all -- since her entire belly was rounded and, more tellingly, she was drenching her French fries in milk shake.

He reported being repelled and fascinated. "It just looked so, I don't know, so unnatural," he said. "And I normally love seeing pregnant women. They remind me of nature, that our bodies are designed for certain purposes with reproduction being the most essential. But can you imagine what a 60-year-old hugely pregnant with twins must have looked like?"

I mentioned the possibility that she looked beautiful, pregnancy's glow illuminating even the toughest, most desiccated of skin. I also think that as a society, we need to get over entrenched ideas about what are personal liberties, no matter how unusual a particular situation. In fact, we adults should be 100 percent in charge of our own bodies, free to make tragically bad mistakes if what we're considering is legal, we've received all the pertinent information including risks, and if the harm extends only to ourselves (e.g. if my tummy tuck doesn't cause a spike in carbon emissions, or if Mike Tyson's facial tattoos don't juice his rapist tendencies). It is our right to medically alter our bodies, including getting pregnant in this case, or ending our own lives in other, less optimistic ones. That is to say, even if others question our judgment or ethics, we should have the right to make mistakes unto ourselves.

Which brings me back to Frieda Birnbaum, for that is the unfortunately bubbe-esque name belonging to this new mother of twin boys. Birnbaum, already the mother of three kids ranging in age from six to 29, wanted another child to provide her six-year-old with a peer. She also wanted to strike a blow against the stigma of older parents, particularly older mothers, since men have been parenting into their dotages forever, and because we are all living a lot longer than we once did. The fact she has other children leads me to believe she knew what she was getting herself into, from the health risks assumed by a 60-year-old pregnant with multiples, to the physical strain put upon new parents, particularly to twins, to the communicable bugs their soon-to-be-preschoolers will be tracking home from nursery school, to stepping on Legos while stumbling to the john to drain one's prostate in the middle of the night, to the generational divide between the Birnbaums and the Brendons and Briannas dropping their twins' classmates off at school. Of course they had to realize they'd most likely miss out on the bulk of their youngest children's adult lives, and vice versa. But they'd gone to extremes, traveling to South Africa to a clinic specializing in IVF for older women for these new babies.

And it seems to me that being a good parent has much more to do with attitude than physical stamina (although, as the mother of twins, I must say physical stamina isn't totally irrelevant). We should measure parental worthiness by whether they demonstrate sound judgment in raising their kids, whether they love their children, and how this love is expressed. Good parents provide stability for their children, a firm sense of place in the world. They set standards but make sure their children know that they love them regardless of achievement. And while the Birnbaums may disappear from their kids' lives sooner than many of us younger parents will, it's how we all lead our lives day-to-day that matters most.

Some people argue that having kids so late in life is selfish. Surely it's wrong to bring kids into this world only to set them up for bullying, and then to orphan them relatively soon after, they say. But I would argue that there are plenty of grandparents left holding the reigns when their children can't parent who go on to raise extraordinary human beings (I'm talking about you, Barack Obama), proving that age isn't a barrier to quality parenting. And in this day and age of reproductive technologies enabling all manner of "family," we better get used to radical shifts in our traditional dynamics.

Not having met Ken and Frieda Birnbaum, I can't claim to know whether or not they used good judgment in making this most recent parenting decision. But I do think that having a shot at life, particularly this one with its built-in community of fellow-siblings, is better than not ever having lived at all.