M ONDAY NIGHT during Fresh Air, I found myself completely caught up in Terry Gross’s interview with Liza Mundy, a longtime staff writer for The Washington Post and author of the book Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Our World. I think you will be, too, and here’s why:
This particular interview was a rerun from last spring, appropriately timed to join the chatter surrounding the recent controversial birth of octuplets to a California mom. The debate (if it can even be classified as such, seeing as there are so many perspectives) on assisted reproduction brings up such complex questions about the role of genetics and the definition of choice (and thereby bringing into question the entire shape of the contemporary feminist indentity) that it’s mind boggling to even consider. That’s why I sat at the edge of a kitchen stool for 40 minutes on Monday night, worrying if I picked up my dinner plate I’d miss a word of Mundy’s interview. (Never fear, you can listen to the whole thing here.) On a second listen, I took down this quote that seems to lie at the crux of this modern conundrum. On describing the choices parents face after they’ve gone through IVF and still have frozen embryos left over, Mundy explains:
When [patients] get to the end of their cycle, if in fact, they’ve had a child, or more than one child, they realize that these embryos, if born, would be the full siblings of their existing children. And it becomes much harder to give them away—to donate them to be raised in a completely different family. There are some agencies that are almost like adoption agencies that exist, trying to facilitate these transactions. But studies have shown that patients almost always change their mind while they’re going through this process about what is the right thing to do about their embryos, and even how to think about their embryos. You know, do they think about them as just little pieces of tissue? Or do they think about them as property? Or do they think about them as potential children? Even if you go into the process thinking about yourself as, say, pro-choice, you might at the end still have a hard time thawing [thereby destroying] those embryos.
How does this complicate our view of sibling relationships as a culture? In an earlier segment of the interview, Mundy describes cases where a woman pregnant with extreme multiples may opt to have her pregnancy selectively reduced (a pregnancy of, say, six embryos would be reduced to two). At this point, gender selection may come into play—and more ideal siblings (and I use the term “ideal” in a very broad sense) are made to the tune of thousands of dollars. Is it less acceptable when a woman pregnant with twins, selectively reduces the embryos to a singleton?
Just confronting such questions is enough to give me goose-bumps. We’re at the frontier, as a culture, of sibling morality and science—what a great opportunity to soak up the view.
Also, check out this week’s Momversation (a video conversation among popular mom-bloggers) about the ethics of planned multiple births, for even more perspectives on this juicy topic.
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I was also fascinated by this interview when I heard it last week. One of the aspects of IVF that I had never considered before was the role that insurance companies can play in the process. For example, Mundy talked about how if a woman’s insurance only covers her for one or two IVF cycles, she may opt to have more embryos injected at one time, to increase the chances of success – which also increases the changes of multiple births, whether desired or not. Personally, I don’t like it when insurance companies have such a role in determining medical policy, especially because they make these decisions based on to what extent they consider infertility a “disease.”