What they created instead was a complex and unconventional family.
As she writes in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, it took five adults to bring two little children, Violet and Kieran, into the world.
Melanie calls her babies “twiblings.” It’s a word more usually used to describe siblings who are extremely close in age, which, until very recently, could only mean children born nine months to a year apart. But, using an egg donor (who she calls the Fairy Goddonor), two gestational surrogates (Melissa and Fie) and Michael’s sperm, Melanie’s son was born five days before her daughter. A Google search shows that she might well be the first one to use the term quite this way. And her new twist on the word is just one more reflection of how we continue to find previously unthinkable ways to use reproductive technology to change the mix and meaning of parenting.
As Melanie writes:
For many couples, the most crushing aspect of fertility treatment is not all the early morning blood-draws but the haunting feeling that the universe is telling them that their union is not — in a spiritual, as well as a biological, sense — fruitful. But I knew Michael and I were a great couple — I had pined so long for the elusive feeling of rightness, and now that I finally had it, I was damned if I was going to let biology unbless us. And I knew if we let biology become Mother Nature, we actually would be damned.
We forged ahead. I wanted to find carriers who would be like female relatives — women with whom it was fun to shop for baby things and who would give us advice on actually caring for the babies and make it all seem doable. While this desire seemed natural to me, I was surprised by how differently other people saw it.
“You won’t have anything in common with the carriers,” a director of a Los Angeles agency (which we decided not to work with) insisted dismissively. The gestational carriers at their agency were mainly white, working-class women, often evangelical Christians — “the kind of girls you went to high school with,” he said, managing to give “high school” an ominous intonation. He waved his hand. “You may think you want to stay in touch now, but trust me, once you have your baby, you’re barely going to remember her name. I call it surrogacy amnesia.”
Many intended parents do feel uneasy at the idea of too much intimacy with their carriers and are willing to pay the hefty agency fees to “manage” the surrogacy and maintain distance between them. But for us, the idea of not being close to the carriers seemed much more alarming, like something from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Moreover, the only true safety in surrogacy lies in trust. What real remedy could there be if, for example, your baby was born with fetal alcohol syndrome?
Readers might remember that this is not the first time gestational surrogacy has been the subject of a cover story in the magazine. Two years ago, Alex Kuczynski wrote about the birth of her son using her own egg, her husband’s sperm and the womb of a stranger named Cathy. The article caused a firestorm, mostly because readers saw Alex as distancing herself from Cathy, viewing her as a vessel whose services were purchased. As Alex wrote of her relationship with her surrogate:
I searched the literature for a way to understand our relationship, one that is unprecedented in the history of human association. No writer or psychiatrist or medical ethicist offered an easy answer for how to behave. When Cathy told me that she considered the couple for whom she gave birth a year earlier as close as extended family, I wondered: Do we all have to have Thanksgiving together? If so, for how many years? And which husband carves the turkey?
Jeff Riedel for The New York TimesThe surrogates, Fie (left) and Melissa (right), with Kieran and Violet.
Melanie’s story shows that there is no one way to navigate these new emotional waters. (The addition of the surrogates’ voices — literally — to the article this time around is but one hint of that.) All parents are different; all families reflect those differences; throw reproductive technology into the mix and everything is amplified. Taken together, the two articles show that there are endless ways to blend love and science.
As Melanie writes:
I ONCE FELT a prick of an unpleasant emotion. It was the week the Fairy Goddonor came to Portland for the egg retrieval. Over tapas one night, I watched her and Michael laughing and suddenly felt unhappy. I poured myself more wine, but instead of dispelling the feelings, it made me feel more alone. “You were so quiet at dinner,” Michael said as we got into the car. He turned to look at me. “Are you not feeling well?”
“Is it weird that you’re having babies with her instead of me?”
“I’m not having babies with her. I’m having babies with Melissa and Fie.”
The conversation dissolved into laughter. That was the thing about our conception: there were too many players to be jealous of any one. And once we made the decision to have children this way, and put away regret, I felt happier embracing it than just tolerating it. There was even something I liked about the idea of a family created by many hands, like one of those community quilt projects, pietra dura, or a mosaic whose beauty arises from broken shards. If it takes a village to raise a child, why not begin with conception? When I tried to think about why I don’t want to have donor-and-surrogacy amnesia, it isn’t that it seems unfair to them (although it is), but that it erases our own experience of how our children came to be. At a basic level, the fact that our children originated through the good will of strangers feels like an auspicious beginning.
Oddly, the very aspects of third-party reproduction that others found threatening, I found reassuring. I wanted to avoid what I think of as the claustrophobia of the nuclear family. I wanted my children to have as many other influences as possible — to have other people teach them how to set up camp or shoot a basketball, as Melissa might; or how to say, “Thanks for the food; can I be excused from the table?” in Danish, as Fie insists her children do. I don’t know what the future will hold, and perhaps we will lose touch with them — we all agreed anyone can close the door at any point. But I hope not. If you consider third-party reproduction to be simply a production detail in the creation of a conventional nuclear family — a service performed and forgotten — then acknowledging the importance of outsiders could make it all seem like a house of cards. But if you conceive of the experience as creating a kind of extended family, in which you have chosen to be related to these people through your children, it feels very rich. At the twiblings’ first birthday party, there were lots of people who cared about them, but Melissa and Fie and their families were the guests of honor. And although the Fairy Goddonor was not there, we thought of her and sent her an antique gold charm of an angel hovering over a crib.
Melanie has responded to the overwhelming number of comments. You can read her response, and comment further, here.
