It’s the Barren B*tches Book Brigade! Embryo Culture by Beth Kohl

by Gabrielle on March 3rd, 2008

Welcome to the most recent installment of the Barren B*tches Book Brigade - a virtual book club where a bunch of bloggers read a book, ask each other questions and then post responses on their various blogs. This month’s choice is Embryo Culture: Making Babies in the Twenty-first Century by Beth Kohl.

Intrigued by the idea of a book tour and want to read more about Embryo Culture? Hop along to more stops on the Barren Bitches Book Brigade by visiting the master list at http://stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/. Want to come along for the next tour? Sign up begins today for tour #11 (The Mistress’s Daughter by AM Homes with author participation!) and all are welcome to join along. All you need is a book and blog.

So, without further ado, here is my contribution to this month’s tour. Questions come from other (in)fertility bloggers. Responses are mine:

Did religion shape the decisions you made about treatment? And in turn, did your infertility change the way you looked at your religion?

While I appreciated Beth’s frequent and thoughtful assessments of what ART meant for her and how it gelled (or didn’t) with her religious beliefs, I couldn’t relate. Of the many, many things that my husband and I discussed before scheduling a consultation with a reproductive endocrinologist, religion was not one of them.

My husband is someone who believes that “atheists are optimists.” Baptized and raised Roman Catholic, I am no longer someone who believes in a loving and gentle God. If he does exist, in my mind he is of the Old Testament variety. Fire and brimstone. Unforgiving. Fickle. Self-righteous. Impetuous. One only needs to look there to see where many believers get the idea that to be barren is to be punished, unloved and unlovable. What’s worse than a woman who ends your familial line?

In chapter 3, Beth considers what kind of God, if any, she should put her fertility faith in. She pictures a benevolent god but then wonders, Or is He a puritanical smiter, my infertility a pox upon me for my lapsed faith, my premarital sexual experience and my all around enjoyment of the fruit of the vine and the leaf of the plant?

Absent my medical history and its obvious tinkerings with my goods, I would probably be asking myself these same questions. Something’s wrong with me? I must have done something to deserve it. God must have a reason. Some, like my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, et. al. find comfort in that last sentence. I find it cruel.

Religion did not shape the decisions I made about treatment. But it has shaped the way I feel about myself as a woman. And when I do permit myself the occasional cry, it usually stems from those feelings of inadequacy that most Catholics feel, a feeling not specific to infertility. I noticed on page 61 that Catholics aren’t alone: I had taken seriously the line spoken by the rabbi who had married us: “May you grow into thousands of myriads.”Those words underscore one of the primary purposes of Jewish marriage…This placed pressure on me not to be the point at which my grandparents’ lines died, a generational black hole.

While religion didn’t shape my decisions about ART, it does shape the way ART is perceived. As it shapes views of motherhood, family, femininity.

If I worry about anything, it is how our child would be perceived by others. Which brings us to the next question…

If you have children via ART, did you ever wonder some of the same things that Beth wondered? Would they be “different”? Would others who found out they were ART babies treat them differently?

When I told my younger brother that we were trying to conceive and filled him in on all of the details (which do, FYI, include donor eggs) at first he was shocked, then thrilled, then he hit me with this line, “That’s great. But I don’t want to be a half-uncle. I really want this kid to know me as his or her uncle.” What a way with words, hey?

In his mind, this was a legitimate conclusion and a legitimate request. Part of the equation isn’t mine, so I’d kind of be like a step-mom, right?

Um, no.

In my mind, if I am lucky enough to nurture an embryo for nine months and then push it out of my lovely bits (or have it removed from my belly), then there are some significant pieces of me invested there. I would be 100% mom.

But that’s how I would feel. I do wonder, like Beth, if I were lucky enough to have twins, would people assume they were born “with a little assistance” and then jump to other conclusions? Would there be other twins in their classes at school? Would they feel special, or just especially different?

Would I continue to blog and write and share if I were lucky enough to conceive, or would that take away from his/her/their story and their opportunity and desire to tell (or not tell) it? I believe in full disclosure, but perhaps my child(ren) would feel differently.

So to answer the question, yes. I guess I think about these things all the time. But I don’t get any closer to any answers.

Tags: beth kohl, book review, embryo culture, fertility blog, Gabrielle Sedor, identity, infertility, religion, reproductive health, stirrup queens, womens health

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