Parenthood

[poliphilo]

I want to say thank you to everyone who responded to my post about surrogacy. It's been really interesting.

Here's a related issue. At the beginning of her article Melanie Thernstrom writes, "to be childless felt like being deprived of something essential: the primal human experience." This niggles me. To begin with I simply disagree. Parenthood is not the "primal human experience".   The primal human experience is engagement with the world- and whatever it happens to throw up; a childless life is not a second-class life. Secondly it comes dangerously close to asserting parenthood as a "right"- which I don't believe it is. Parenthood is a privilege- which many abuse. Children are not property or playthings or an extension of the parent, but  autonomous beings whom the parent is never going to fully understand. The greatest thing a parent can do for their child is to let it go. As Khalil Gibran wrote, "Your children are not your children."

I'd like to know what you think...

Comments

[oakmouse]

In every society, as long as humanity has existed, there have always been childless people. Sometimes they've been unmarried and thus required by social norms to remain ceilbate, like Victorian maiden aunts; sometimes they've been biologically unable to reproduce; sometimes they choose not to reproduce. The childless, like the poor, will always be with us.

I didn't get around to replying to the surrogacy post because I have such complex issues around childbearing and infertility, and I had such a complex response to the article. On the one hand, the author came across as a privileged, wealthy yuppie who just wasn't willing to face the hand that life had dealt her and was willing to do anything and spend anything to buy what she wanted. While I was reading, I wanted to tell her, "Suck it up, buttercup, and stop whining." On the other hand, having had three miscarriages and one stillborn child, and knowing the pain of wanting children and being unable to have them, I can sympathize with the desire to find a way somehow. I would never have chosen surrogacy, but that's my personal response, not a dictate of what others should do.

Ultimately, the article reminded me of the abuses possible in a surrogacy situation, and of the extent to which surrogacy is mainly an option for the well-off. The author's airy assumption of privilege, her princessy ability to demand the perfect egg donor and perfect surrogate and get the perfection she demanded nicely obscured the actual moral and ethical issues involved.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Those maiden aunts and bachelor uncles had their role in the family. And, of course, every so often one of them would turn out to be an Emily Dickinson or an Edward Lear.

My mother's family was well supplied with Victorian maiden aunts. They were formidable people- campaigners for women's rights and disarmament and other Quakerish values.

Not having children frees one up to do other things.

Most of my queasiness about surrogacy would evaporate if it was a option open to the poor.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Or indeed a Jane Austen...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Or a Lewis Carroll...