The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Logic Behind Fertility Stats

Guest post by Sarah Elizabeth Richards, the author of "The Clock Ticker's Reprieve," a narrative account of how egg freezing affected the lives of five women, to be published by Simon & Schuster in summer 2010.

In response to my article about Rielle Hunter's chances of having a baby at 43, a reader asks how researchers determine a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant each month, especially when they don’t know when or how frequently she is having intercourse. Since a woman is only fertile about three days a month, the stat assumes she’s had sex during this window ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

David Brooks' Life Will Have No Meaning If You Fail to Breed

Yesterday’s David Brooks column was written in response to the rarely asked question: What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized everyone in the Western Hemisphere? Without progeny, explains everyone's favorite National Greatness Conservative, we of the West would plunge into a “cataclysmic spiritual crisis,” deem our lives to be “without meaning and purpose,” and forgo any grand ambitions we might once have nurtured ... (Read more in Double X.)

Quiverfull Feminism

"The threat of population decline," writes Michelle Goldberg at the American Prospect, "is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies.... I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there's so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn't, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones!"

I wrote a Reason feature on this issue for anyone who is interested in sociological and economic analysis of natalist policy. But for now I'll just say: Liberals ought to be very, very cautious about engaging natalist rhetoric in the promotion of social welfare policies. The claim that Western Civilization is on the brink of extinction might help sell universal daycare or any other policy that can be cast as an incentive to motherhood, but population alarmism lends credence to a number of wildly illiberal arguments. Once you've bought into the idea that a nation-state must defend its existence through native population growth, you've come uncomfortably close to arguing that a particular subset of women has a patriotic responsibility to reproduce. You've also legitimized some legislator's attempt to bribe women into using their bodies in a particular way. There is a reason that the producers of Demographic Winter are traditionalist Christians.

Gradual population decline of the kind we are seeing in Germany and Japan is, I think, manageable. But even if we insist on addressing population decline as some kind of crisis, it's not at all clear that liberal policies like paid family leave are going to turn the tide. The most obvious difference we see between developed countries with relatively high birth rates and developed countries with relatively low birthrates is cultural. Swedes and Americans are relatively more likely than, say, Singaporeans or Koreans, to believe that work and motherhood are compatible. The countries with the lowest birth rates in the world are countries in which childless women are integrated into the workforce but women with children are expected to stay home.

Such attitudes are distinct from redistributional social welfare policies. It may be that Sweden's welfare state is responsible for its near-replacement birth rate, but the evidence for this is not terribly compelling. In order to frame the story this way one needs to cast the high-fertility United States as an anomalous outlier rather than part of the general, culture-driven trend.

I am sympathetic to Goldberg in that population alarmism might be a useful way to argue for policies I happen to support; more open borders, for example. But there are better arguments for a humane immigration policy, and there are better arguments for an expansive welfare state.

Should Men Be Listening to That Ticking Bio-Clock?

Remember Tony Randall, who made his first baby at age 77? Or Michael Douglas, Rupert Murdoch, Mick Jagger—all still churning out offspring in their elder years? Or Mr. Rahman, whose reproduction line Emily Y. noted below, still turning them out at 63? They might be a bit ... irresponsible. Older men's swimmers might still be strong enough to hit an egg, but the chromosomes they're carrying might be a bit weak. According to the U.K. Independent's Steve Connor, reporting on an Australian scientist's retrospective study of more than 33,000 children born in the United States between 1959 and 1965, older men's offspring are more likely to show "neural tube defects and a range of medical disorders of later life, such as schizophrenia, dyslexia, bipolar disorder and autism." These older fathers' children did less well on intelligence tests ... unlike the older mothers' children, who did better than those of younger moms.

It's kinda nice to know that women shouldn't be alone in worrying about our aging oeufs—that men should worry about their innermost parts, too. And perhaps it's useful to know that women should feel free to make babies while older—but should rely on a younger man's, um, input.

OctoMom To Become PornoMom?

TMZ reports the San Fernando Valley-based adult production company Vivid Entertainment has offered Nadya Suleman $1 million to star in an adult movie. Taken at face value, this story is all kinds of wrong. How the story of a freak-mother has twisted itself into a tale of a would-be MILF? OctoMILF? is beyond the scope of my limited brain capacity. Whatever those parties involved or not involved have in mind, I know I do not want to see it. What the story does testify to truly is that the adult movie industry is suffering mightily during this recession if these are the lengths it has to go to to get attention these days. Once upon a time, XXX was outre. After a while, it went mainstream. Now, I guess it's just passe. For some reason, the conflation of OctoMom and pornography brings to my mind the ancient Japanese tradition of tentacle erotica and The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, in which a woman finds herself in the erotic embrace of an octopus. I suppose these United States really have been pornified, when starring in an adult movie is the punch line to the new American Dream.

Panics and Markets

As for the octuplets, let's hope their arrival prompts a hard, cold examination of assisted reproductive technology rather than endless appalled voyeurism. This isn't the first fertility freak show to unfold during hard times: Remember the story of the poor Dionne quintuplets 75 years ago? Then the government—the girls were born in Canada—did step in, in the name of protecting the babies from exploitation and danger. But instead of helping, the effect was to perpetuate the circus: The girls were sequestered in Quintland, which became a national tourist attraction up there with (or even beyond) Niagara Falls. That's not part of a stimulus package we need, but here is a market that surely needs regulating.

Is Renting a Womb Worse (or Better) Than Adopting?

Nina, I agree with you that the worst thing about Alex K’s New York Times Magazine article this past Sunday—about her surrogate pregnancy and motherhood—were the slyly critical pictures and Alex’s class-cluelessness. Moe suggests (as do many others) that adoption might have been less genetically vain than surrogacy. But that suggestion presumes adoption isn't exploitive—and, after a year spent investigating problems in international adoption, I can tell you that's not always so. 

Sometimes adoption is good for all concerned, especially if the child is older, sick, or has special needs. But not everyone is prepared to take on those needy children. Far more people are lined up for healthy infant adoption—which isn't easy, it turns out.

News flash: Worldwide, there are more families seeking healthy infants than there are healthy infants in need of new families. Some of the international adoption programs are arguably surrogacy in disguise—but without real payment or protections for the birth families. In some countries, a significant portion of women appeared to have been getting pregnant to sell the babies; in others, babies were being coercively purchased or defrauded or even kidnapped away from the birth families. (The big exception is China, where the adoption program is carefully overseen, but China has become more restrictive.) And that doesn't count the birth families whose children were defrauded, coerced, or flatly kidnapped away from them. (For detailed and heartbreaking stories about this, check my institute's Web site, where we've been posting our adoption documentation and research.)

Adoption depends on tragedy and loss of some kind—like organ donation, except with less oversight or regulation and with much more money to be made for the brokers. As with organ donation, in adoption there are more people on the list than there are children available. I haven't looked as deeply into domestic adoption but have heard enough to know there ARE coercive practices and serious regulatory failures; birth mothers DO get coerced, and adoptive parents get less consumer protection than if they joined a gym.

In surrogacy at least everyone goes into it with eyes open; the surrogates are screened for their emotional stability and are more or less fairly compensated. I’m guessing it’s less exploitive than renting out the body parts that Meghan and Hanna are discussing below. But maybe that’s just me.

She Rented a Woman's Womb and Then Was Rude to the Landlady

Here's a post from Slate contributor Nina Shen Rastogi, who's having technical difficulties:

Susannah,

I think the galling thing about Kuczynski's Times piece wasn't her decision to have a child via gestational surrogacy—I think lots of people can relate to the intense desire to have a baby that's genetically related to you. (As Shakespeare noted ominously: "Die single"—i.e., childless—"and thine image dies with thee.") What was upsetting about the piece was her sheer tone-deafness. Take the following passage, for example:

When we came across Cathy's application, we saw that she was by far the most coherent and intelligent of the group. She wrote that she was happily married with three children. Her answers were not handwritten in the tiny allotted spaces; she had downloaded the original questionnaire and typed her responses at thoughtful length. Her attention to detail was heartening. And her computer-generated essay indicated, among other things, a certain level of competence. This gleaned morsel of information made me glad: she must live in a house with a computer and know how to use it.

A lower-income person who's "coherent" and knows how to type—gee, that's just like finding a mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy! Kuczynski just ends up seeming patronizingly elitist and sort of oblivious throughout the piece. I found myself wanting something deeper, more insightful—some real, felt evidence that the experience had actually taught her something. I would have also been happy with a nice middle-finger retort to anyone who would question her choices—but her faux-genteel, halfway-apologetic stance didn't fly with me. (Though I will say, I did really like this line on Page 8: "She could be seen as the fertile, glowing mother-to-be as well as the hemorrhoidal, flatulent, lumpen pregnant woman. I could be the erotic, perennially sensual nullipara, the childbirth virgin, and yet I was also the dried-up crone with a uterus full of twigs.")

But honestly, Kuczynski didn't have a chance in hell of winning my sympathy once I saw the accompanying photos. There's Cathy, the birth mother, literally barefoot and pregnant on a dirty porch. And then there's Kuczynski, looking regal in her neat separates, on the lawn of her sprawling Southampton home, while a black "baby nurse"—seriously, that's what the caption says—stands smartly at attention (but without pulling focus). Even the cover is a doozy—couldn't someone have ironed Cathy's khakis? Or at least told her to close her mouth?

Alex Kuczynski Rented Another Woman's Womb. So What?

In last weekend's New York Times Magazine, beauty writer, Botox fan, and Beauty Junkies author Alex Kuczynski writes about how, after she'd spent more than $100,000 on in vitro fertilization and suffered multiple miscarriages, she hired another woman to carry her baby for her. So far, there are more than 400 comments on the article, many written by women, most blasting Kuczynski for having the gall to rent a womb. You should have adopted! You're a spoiled brat! You're a kept woman who sees a baby as one more purchase! I say: Give her a break. She was infertile. She'd lost multiple babies in utero. She had the means—thanks to her writing career and her wealthy husband—to have her egg and her husband's sperm implanted into the womb of a woman who was willing to carry her baby for $25,000. I'm not sure what Kuczynski's bashers expected her to do. Follow their directions? Suffer silently so as not to offend anybody with her money? Do ... nothing? Something about this outpouring of female vitriol reminds me of the tarring and feathering of Sarah Palin. Maybe you don't agree with this woman's choices or that woman's beliefs, but who are you to deny her the choices that she has the right, power, or money to make? Sounds like envy to me.