Greg Bales

The Ethics of ART; or, What Would Angelina Do?

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

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way infertility has shifted Greg’s and my individual and collective realities, our sense of boundaries, lines in the sand.

From Baby Steps to Baby Shoes:

I always thought I would never do ivf. But when one is told that’s the only option (and is better educated about the process), a different thought process can pervade. Especially when it’s less expensive than adoption.

Infertility has taught me never to say never. And never to question someone else’s lines—that may mean choosing adoption before pursuing any treatment or that may mean trying every conceivable experimental reproductive technology.

Why, indeed. And how many days after we found out about the abysmally low sperm count did it take for us to start accepting IVF (with ICSI, of course) as a perfectly acceptable avenue toward having a child? Two? Three?

So what happened? Did something drastic change so suddenly in our collective value system? Or were we forced to accept that we’d previously been judgmental when it came to others’ reproductive choices? Both? Did Angelina earn the right to have a biological child only because she’d adopted her first two?

Here’s something: My body doesn’t give a good g*ddamn about ethics. It wants to grow a baby, and it wants to do it now (before it’s too late). Long ago, I began to understand that my ovaries have plans of their own. My own ambivalence about how good a mother I might one day make plays no part in those plans.