Greg Bales

How Technology Ruins the Story

In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb

Ann writes about how infertility creates discomforting stories:

I want to have a conception story that I can tell with a bit of a wink: that it was a result of making up from a big fight, or happened between church services on Christmas Eve, or even that it was just from good old reliable missionary position sex. When people say “I know what you were doing 9 months before your daughter was born” I want them to be right. But Zoe’s conception happened when Chris went in to the clinic one morning and then I followed about an hour and a half later, and laid down on the doctor’s table, and the nice nurse used a catheter to work the magic. The result of that magic? Wonderful, beautiful, sweet, and recently, pretty silly. I wouldn’t trade her for the best conception story in the world. I just wish I was more at peace with our story. It’s funny too, in some ways I’m very proud of Zoe’s conception—proud that we persevered and that IF didn’t break me. Because sometimes it felt like it would. But that pride hasn’t lent me comfort with the story yet—I haven’t found the right way to tell the story.

Our experience will instead be completely mediated. First there will be follicle-stimulating drugs, then there will be trips to a clinic to deposit our respective haploid cells in a petri dish. In that petri dish a lab tech will jam one of my haploid cells into one or more of K’s. The DNA in those cells will join; the cells will split, and they will split again until they are ripe. Then, they will be stuffed into a vat of liquid nitrogen to be frozen until we return to the clinic to ask someone to deposit one or more of them in K’s uterus. Finally—maybe—implantation will happen, and our own happy journey to parenthood will have begun! Or, like as not, maybe not.

Like Ann’s, our experience will have been been completely mediated by technology, an astonishing fact given that sex with consequences is one of the fundamental assumptions of biology and, to the extent those consequences are desired, sex with consequences is also one of the fundamental assumptions of humanity. That we cannot count on those assumptions; that we must rely upon intermediaries to enhance my biology so that we, too, may put on masks to join the ranks of the normal—what words are there to describe that? What stories are there to compensate?