A Fertility Issue

Hi friend,

In the United States, women are having kids later than they used to. Why? Well, there are obvious economic pressures, like the ones illustrated in this Vox piece. There are also new fertility technologies to help women conceive later. Can you believe that the first birth from a frozen embryo was in 1984, and that the first person born via IVF is only 46? (She’s turning 47 in two weeks, happy early birthday to her.)

Delaying parenthood, as Time’s Jamie Ducharme writes, is a sign of social progress. It allows for higher levels of education, better financial stability, and more selectivity when it comes to partners.

But waiting to have kids ‘til later in life can mean running up against unfortunate biological realities. As one family demographer said in the Time piece, “some people who want children eventually may not be able to have them when the time comes.”

These sorts of challenges are laid out in a new memoir, The Mother Code, by Ruthie Ackerman. 

Ackerman covers so much, including her initial ambivalence about having a kid, and then the realities (and costs) of IVF, egg freezing, and donor eggs. As more women pursue parenthood later in their lives, it will only become more important to talk openly about these tricky topics. She uses her reporter brain to dig into the science, but it’s intensely personal, too. 

The book is fascinating, emotional, and full of details we’d never seen written down before. Read on for an excerpt from The Mother Code, which is available now on Bookshop or Amazon, plus a few recommendations for your weekend.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

I sat with my back against the bed, my laptop opened on my thighs. I’d been hunched over in one place for so long that the heat from the bottom of my computer had penetrated through my thigh fat, down to the muscle until my leg radiated with numbness. But I didn’t care. I’d been meandering through the corridors of the internet like a bad dream, opening every door in the dark hallway, and when I didn’t find what I was looking for, I slammed it shut and ran for the next one. And the next one. Until I was frantically opening and closing so many doors that I didn’t remember which I’d already opened, and I was running in circles, spirals, figure eights, chasing I didn’t know what anymore.

I landed in a Facebook group, one of several I’d found over the last few months. A common vocabulary carried across these groups, one that identified those who used donor eggs as “warriors” and “survivors.” The language reminded me of cancer. The women who donated their eggs are “angels.” The children born are “miracles.”

It was as if these women needed to cheer themselves on, convince each other that they were not only just as good as other women who have babies “naturally,” but better because they’d suffered so much to get to the land of motherhood. I empathized with them. I understood their need to prove they weren’t imposters, fraudulent. I understood their need to prove they weren’t selfish, that they hadn’t worshiped their careers for too long and then suddenly scrambled to buy their way into motherhood.

As women continue to start their families later in life, egg donation will keep soaring. There will be even more women, like me and those I met in these online groups, who are considering donor eggs as an option and trying to understand what it means to carry a fetus created from someone else’s egg.

Part of the reason that women are turning to these forums to seek answers to their questions is that the field of egg donation is so young. In fact, it started in my lifetime. Until 1983, when the first pregnancy from egg donation took place, the person who gave birth to you was the person who gave you your DNA. There wasn’t a dividing line between biological mothers or bio-moms (the person whose body you come from) and genetic donors (the person whose genetic information is used to create an embryo). Now we have a whole new language, a whole new worldview, a whole new set of questions and concerns.

Before my husband, Rob, and I sat down to talk about whether to use donor eggs, I had plowed ahead, calling all the top fertility clinics to find out about their donor egg programs. My journalism training means that even in my personal life, I can’t take off my reporter hat. I pulled together a spreadsheet on my computer that outlined everything I’d learned so I could share it with Rob. Some of the clinics wouldn’t allow us to see any photos of the donors. Some would let us only see baby pictures. Others worked only with fresh eggs from donors who had just had an egg retrieval. Still others only used frozen eggs. There was even a clinic with a money-back-guarantee program. I felt a bit grossed out even saying those words, like we were treating making a baby like a Black Friday deal at a big box store. This was a human life, not the newest iPhone, but there was something reassuring all the same that we wouldn’t be spending still more money only to come home with no baby.

Late one afternoon, as dusk was gathering outside, I said to Rob, “If we’re going to do this, it’s really important to me to see photos of the donor.” I had, you’ll note, skipped over the part about whether we would use donor eggs at all and instead focused on the nitty gritty of the process. “I want the donor to seem real to me. I want to feel like I know her. Or at least feel that she’s someone I’d like to get to know.”

But Rob wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the donor looked like. “I don’t want to picture this other person every time I look at our child,” he said. “We will be our kid’s parents, not the donor.”

By the time we were talking about all of this, I’d spoken to an acquaintance who had paid extra for donor eggs from a woman who had gone to an Ivy League university. But now Rob and I discussed how we were pretty certain that the education level — and the prestige of the college someone attended — meant nothing when it came to intelligence. Wasn’t where most of us ended up going to school somewhat random or based on factors like wealth that weren’t genetic at all? Would Ivy League eggs really guarantee us a more intelligent child? And if so, how important was intelligence to us?

Another acquaintance had paid thousands of dollars extra for eggs from a Jewish donor. I’m Jewish. Rob isn’t. Should I care about whether our donor is Jewish, too? I wondered. Would a Jewish donor mean our child would be that much closer to me genetically?

It was the middle of June and hot as hell as Rob and I sat in Dr. Sasson’s windowed office at Shady Grove Fertility in Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania. Dr. Sasson was one of the fertility doctors I’d researched whose clinic offered a money-back-guarantee program for donor eggs. Now we were listening as he spoke slowly, writing every word down, so we would understand all of the complicated details he was laying out for us about the donor egg process.

“We don’t believe the industry standard is fair. Patients going through fertility treatments do not have enough viable financial options,” he said. “Instead of charging twenty-five thousand dollars and up for each treatment like other clinics, our base price is thirty-two thousand dollars for up to six rounds, but if you don’t get pregnant we’ll return your money, no questions asked.”

I let his words sink in.

“So how does this work for you?” Rob asked bluntly. “How do you not go bankrupt?”

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TO WATCH Just FYI, there is a hunky new Superman. If you’re in the mood for something more serious, there’s the intense (and very relevant) new movie Sovereign, where Nick Offerton plays an anti-government extremist who sadly pulls his son into his mess.

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TO LISTEN ‘90s Belgian electronica collective Soulwax is releasing singles from an upcoming new album – doesn’t this one sound like it’d be great on a Bourne-esque movie soundtrack?

TO DO Our kids love those squishy little toys that seem to come home in every birthday party gift bag. So when we saw this DIY kit on Oh Joy’s Instagram, we decided to order it for a seven-year-old’s birthday gift — and it was a huge hit.

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On the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That…: “The characters register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.” • Done improperly, non-invasive anti-aging procedures could actually cause your face to age more quickly. • Researchers have found the HPgV virus in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease.

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