It's weird. Not weird. I mean, I get it. But it is still weird.

I have a friend who did her PhD research on surrogate mothers in India. Women who make their living by renting out their uterus. I think she's in sociology but I can't swear to that.

Adoption is a pain in the ass, there's no question. A pain in the ass and fraught with a ton of ethical questions that you get to avoid asking if you opt not to have children or drew the "healthy womb, healthy testes, hetero preferences" straws back at the great straw drawing. Interracial adoption? Will that make us a spectacle? Is international adoption coercive and racist (see previous question: adopting black infants is easy. Are you really so committed to not raising a child of African descent that you'll go to Russia? Discuss.) Are we committed to adopting an infant? Even though there are a zillion five year olds who could use a parent? What about a child with health issues? Special needs? If you just toss the sperm and egg dice, you find a way to work with what you roll; it is a lot harder to say "Yes, I'll decide now that I'm going to raise a child who is going to have intense developmental issues and need a lifetime of advocacy." But that totally belies the fact that every child needs a lifetime of advocacy. I'm nominally "healthy" (so they say ...) but I still lean hard on my parents for emotional and moral support. It's a rabbit hole, is all I'm saying. I'm not surprised that someone would shrink from answering those questions.

We have all this identity tied up in our reproductive organs. Virility is the highest order of manhood. For women, fertility comes second to being attractive to men, but once you're over 25 you're washed up old hag and fertility is all you've got. It makes perfect evolutionary sense that we're so programmed to think these things -- if you were just making a rational decision, no rational person would choose to grow an alien being inside their stomach, tire constantly, ache and vomit. Risk her own life (historically speaking anyway) to bring a child into this world who will proceed to depend parasitically on you for at least five years before it can even begin finding it's own food and reliably pooping in discreet and designated locations. We'd never have kids.

We're childless by laziness at this point, biology hasn't cooperated and to get a child some other way you have to do more than just have sex from time to time. We haven't done anything, so here we are. It's been amazing to me how many people's first response to our situation is some variation on "IVF, of course." Because "of course" our first goal is a child that is biologically ours. Of course that's what we really want, and it's just our willful political stubbornness that has us considering other options. We could afford it, in theory, the money is there in our retirement accounts and in our savings, but I don't think it makes sense. I don't think it makes sense at all to go so far out of our way to create this perfect simulation of what we thought that biology would do for us. Nevermind that there are pretty serious health issues behind our situation and we'd be going out of our way to increase the odds of passing those on, which makes no sense what so ever. Nevermind that we'd be spending tens of thousands of dollars on elective medical care, money that could surely be better spent on, say, necessary medical care for a living person.

We have a friend who did not draw the healthy uterus straw and it was incredible to me how personal it was to her, how heavily her identity as a woman was tied up in being able to successfully grow a thing in her uterus. She did a lot of pointing at me, a lot of "You're body is so much more feminine. You're a real woman, you won't have this trouble." as though I haven't spent my whole life fighting off that voice that keeps telling me I'm fat. Which is to say ... women aren't supposed to just enjoy the skin we live in and be happy with who we are. Must always strive to be someone else.

Not unrelated: I don't even want to put my name on the post because it is so "intimate." So there I am, right there with it.

Also not unrelated, the thought I've had more than any other since the latest rush of "you'll never be rich if you major in english" stories is (has been?) "Well shit we could sure use more people thinking about ethics over here."