Posted on 09/08/2014 7:16:40 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
My Latin is not what it once was and it was never much. So lately I have been making amends for schoolboy sloth by reading a few of the classics. I have just finished (in translation) and highly recommend The Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus, which chronicles the years of Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula and Nero, (an) analysis of palace politics.
Whoa! Excuse me: just where is all this going? Is this relevant to anything at all or is it just self-indulgent bloviation?
Well, sort of. Be patient. Let me press on.
It was a bit dismaying to read how determined the Emperors were to pass on their power and prerogatives to their children -- but how little they did to produce them. Augustus had no sons and adopted Tiberius, his step-son by his third wife. Tiberius was succeeded by an adopted grand-nephew, Caligula, and the odious Caligula by his uncle, Claudius.
Claudius’ only son died in his teens and so he was succeeded by the perverse and capricious Nero, the adopted son of his fourth wife. Nero’s first wife was barren so he divorced and murdered her, then married Poppaea. Her first child died and Nero kicked her to death when she was pregnant with the second. And so on.
As the Romans would have said, contortum est, it’s complicated.
Is it drawing too long a bow if I see a parallel in the couplings of our own era?
Recently I read about services provided by EggBanxx, a new company in Manhattan which freezes eggs for socially infertile single women. The cost is open-ended, depending on how many eggs they want to store and how much pain they are willing to endure. It could be as much as US$40,000.
“I don’t have a significant other . . . but I hope to one day and have kids,” one woman told the New York Post. “I want to take my fertility into my own hands, rather than put pressure on the person I have my next relationship with. I don’t want to be in the position when I’m in my late 30s and panicking because I haven’t found the right man and I’d compromise and take anyone off the street!”
Or as EggBanxx’s marketing director described her own egg-freezing experience, “The pressure is off, and I feel so empowered. I can now concentrate on my career and becoming who I want to be before having children!”
Reading between the lines, you can feel the pain of the company’s over-achieving clients, who are mostly in their early or mid-30s and desperate to bring at least one child into the world before their biological clock stops ticking. Behind them may be two or three relationships; ahead is loneliness.
They are so desperate, in fact, that they fall into to hands of sharks like EggBanxx. Lord Robert Winston, a British IVF pioneer, argues that egg freezing is “a confidence trick” used by avaricious IVF clinics to exploit the fears of desperate women. “Women are spending vast amount of money on this treatment but the success rates simply aren’t there. In fact less than 10% of the women who do it end up getting pregnant,” he says.
Like the emperors of Rome, the yuppies of Manhattan are Masters of the Universe, the envy of 99.99% of the world. They have the independence to shape their own destiny. They have all the autonomy money can buy.
But as Tacitus wrote, Multos qui conflictari adversis videantur, beatos; ac plerosque, quanquam magnas per opes, miserrimos: “We may see many struggling against adversity who yet are happy; and more, although abounding in wealth, who are most wretched.”
Independence and autonomy are the building blocks of contemporary morality. Just do it. Think Different. Don't Forget to be Awesome. Follow Your Dreams. But just as they brought little joy to the emperors, their wives and their children, they fail us as well. There must be something which governs romance, sexuality, fertility and children which is higher than self-affirmation.
2014 marks 2,000 years since the death of Augustus. You would think that two millennia of technological, educational and social progress would have raised the level of our relationships as well as our standard of living. It seems not.
Lord Robert Winston, a British IVF pioneer, argues that egg freezing is “a confidence trick” used by avaricious IVF clinics to exploit the fears of desperate women. “Women are spending vast amount of money on this treatment but the success rates simply aren’t there. In fact less than 10% of the women who do it end up getting pregnant,” he says.
I’m the uncle of triplet nieces conceived via IVF so I’m probably biased. No, I’m definitely biased when I say that it’s a wonderful technology. This egg freezing business in anticipation of getting pregnant in the indefinite future is a different matter. Very sad, actually.
We had years of fertility issues but I am so glad we refused to go the IVF route and went to docs who concentrated on diagnosing and fixing the underlying physiological issues rather than papering it over with IVF or the Pill or some equally unhelpful solution. Since being treated, we’ve had 6 pregnancies and 4 children.
I am convinced much of the fertility industry in this country is a moneymaking venture that doesn’t give a rat’s rear about women’s health. If they did, they would help women get better and conceive naturally.
How many are fertilized?
Of course its marketed in Manhattan. It is one of the strangest places I have ever lived. The group-think is very strong, and its a very self-absorbed place with many people living there focused solely on their own profession and money. My recommendation to anyone wanting children there would be bite the bullet and LEAVE.
It’s a perverse and dangerous technology, not wonderful, because it reduces the human person to a commodity. It deprives many/most the resulting lives of two parents, to which they’re entitled according to the natural order. It reduces human life to property, that comes or else is disposed of not according to God’s will but man’s. It creates unaddressed human rights problems in the long-term storage of “snowflake babies” that will never be allowed to be born, and public health dangers in the uncontrolled way multiple embryos can be created from a single sperm donor. Above all, it is an offense against human dignity, dissolving the link between the mystery and power of conjugal sexual relations and the understanding of every human life as a gift from God, not a consumer product that appears on demand like an ordered-in pizza.
You will object: “but we got the baby we wanted!” And I will respond: you do not have a “right” to a baby — not least because once you view that baby as a right, you come to view its purpose for being in the world as satisfying your desires and ambitions. That “wanted” baby has a right to his or her own life, and not to be burdened from birth with the expectations of others.
“It’s a perverse and dangerous technology, not wonderful, because it reduces the human person to a commodity.”
Sorry, but I cannot see how a married couple who want to bring a child into the world and give that child love and nurturing are reducing any human person to being ‘a commodity’ just because they had to use IVF to have that child. There are plenty of people who have children without the need for IVF who treat their children horribly. Child abuse, in its many forms, is much more common than realized by many, and that truly is a sin - as is any abuse of innocence.
We did not use IVF, and so I am not ‘defending’ IVF from that perspective. We were blessed to have a healthy child who is the biggest gift we’ve ever received, and who am I to tell others who weren’t as fortunate and who have hope via IVF that they shouldn’t have a child? That said, I think the criteria used to determine whether someone is a candidate for IVF should be just as strict as that used to formally adopt. I entirely agree with you that becoming parents is not a right, it is the biggest privilege and responsibility that anyone can receive.
Well said.
As someone who had to make this choice, I agree with you completely.
sitetest
I invite you to tell my brother (whose political views, BTW, make me look like a Trotskyite) that his three daughters are perverse, unnatural and an offense to human dignity. But I suggest you do so from a distance.
That’s a good example of the slow-witted sentimentality I was talking about. Learn to read.
BTW, if your brother were such a true-blue conservative, he would be more aware of the importance of restraint in social norms, technology, etc. Social and technological change are fraught with unintended consequences, no matter how well intentioned, so REAL conservative don’t just go ahead and do stuff just because they can. No matter how much they wanna. A real conservative should know that. I would not expect a Trot to get it, of course.
OK, fine, whatever. You can quote Tacitus and I’ll just sentimentally and slow-wittedly watch the joy my brother and sister in law take in their daughters.
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