In the fall of 1985, I flew from Boston to Lima, Peru, to adopt a four-month-old child. some 18 years earlier I had given birth to my first child. During the last 10 of those years, I had struggled to give birth again, combating an infertility problem that had resulted, as is often the case, from use of a contraceptive device during the intervening years. I had been married when I produced my first child, but my husband and I divorced when my son was just a few years old. Years later I decided I wanted more children, regardless of whether I was married. But I found that I was unable to conceive.
I subjected myself to every form of medical treatment that offered any possibility of success. I had operations to diagnose my problem, I took fertility drugs and charted my menstrual cycles and my temperature, and I had sexual intercourse according to the prescribed schedule. I had surgery to remove scar tissue from my fallopian tubes. And I went through in vitro fertilization (IVF) repeatedly in programs in three different states. As a single person in my early forties, I was officially excluded from every IVF program in the country that I learned about. Almost all had a maximum age of 40, and all limited their services to married couples. But I was determined. I begged my way into programs that were willing to consider bending their age rules, and I presented myself as married, with the help of a loyal and loving friend who was willing to play the part of husband. Unaccustomed to a life of fraud, I spent much of my IVF existence terrified that I would be discovered.
Then I got lucky. I ran out of money. IVF treatment was excluded from health insurance coverage during this period, and I had cursed my fate and timing, as it seemed likely that the exclusion would eventually be eliminated. I had been paying the going price, $5,000 for a full treatment cycle, and had about run through what savings I had.
I woke one morning in March 1985--I learned later that it was the month, and for all I know the very day, my son-to-be was born--and lay in bed thinking that I didn't want to spend all my remaining money on IVF. I would need it if I was to adopt. And I didn't want to spend any more time and energy or any more of my life on the fertility pursuit. I wanted a child, and I wanted to move on. I called my IVF program that day and said I would not go forward with another treatment cycle.
I was one of the fortunate infertility patients, because I did move on to adoption and to parenting. Treatment enables only a limited number of the infertile to conceive and bear children, and it prevents many from ever considering adoption as a form of parenting. I now look back in amazement at the person I was, traversing the country from one IVF program to another in search of an infertility fix. I am bemused at my shifting notions of "natural" and of "choice." It had seemed natural to pursue biologic parenting, even when the pursuit led me into the high-tech world of IVF where the doctors and lab technicians took over the business of conception, "harvesting" the eggs they had cultivated in the patient's body and inseminating them in glass dishes. It also had seemed that I was making choices when I decided to move on to new stages of treatment. Indeed, I had felt thrilled with the sense that I was pushing against the social and biologic constraints that prevented a single woman with damaged fallopian tubes from giving birth. Now I look back and see a woman driven by the forces that had told her since birth that she should go forth and multiply, that her ability to bear a child was central to her meaning as a human being, and that "real" parenting involved raising that biologically linked child.
