Monopoly of Desperation

News Announcement:  Humans aren't an endangered species!

This isn't news to doctors who specialize in reproductive technology.  What these MDs know is:  Reproductive Technology is Big Business.  As Debora Spar (President of Barnard College and author of "The Baby Business:  How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception") writes, "harsh as it may seem, we need to view reproductive medicine as an industry with all the commercial prospects and potential foibles that other industries display."  Oh, and what foibles there are!  Just this week it was reported in the NY Times that one sperm donor produced 150 children.  Wow!  What is our society doing?  We're crazy!

The NY Times also had an article in the Styles section recently that asked:  Are You as Fertile as You Look?  The answer: No.  Gasp! The effect: Millions of New Yorkers were compelled to make appointments with their gynecologists this week because being pregnant is in style, at least according to the Times.  But let's face it.  Being pregnant has always been in style though perhaps not quite like it is today thanks to Reproductive Technology.

Reproductive Technology is disturbing for many reasons, and Angela Davis has articulated one reason very well:  "The politics of reproduction hinge on the social construction of motherhood [and] the new developments in reproductive technology have encouraged the contemporary emergence of popular attitudes-- at least among the middle classes-- that bear a remarkable resemblance to the 19th Century cult of motherhood... it is as if the recognition of infertility is now a catalyst, among some groups of women, for a motherhood quest that has become more compulsive and more openly ideological than during the 19th Century... the availability of the technology further mythologizes motherhood as the true vocation of women."  Chilling and creepy.

So now we have many women who are in their forties and fifties questing after motherhood, feeling desperate to have a child.  This desperation is an important part of the reproductive technology equation according to Charis Thompson, author of Making Parents:  The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies.  She says that "a prominent aspect of the experience of reproductive technologies for infertility is their 'never enough' quality... this desperate, private compulsion to motherhood doesn't just propel activism but also plays a role in the market of assisted reproductive technologies in the United States.  That is, it imposes what I refer to as a 'monopoly of desperation.'"

How dare the marketers of reproductive technology encourage a "monopoly of desperation" among women!  How dare they use a marketing strategy that aims to convince women, in Victorian fashion, that to be a woman is to be a mother.  This message to women in general is contemptible, and to send this message to women who are infertile is cruel.

Although the article in the NY Times makes it clear that to get pregnant by conceiving naturally in your forties is very difficult and almost impossible in your fifties, the article doesn't address this desperation to have children after age forty.  It comes close to saying something about the psychology of this issue when the article mentions our society's fixation with celebrities who get pregnant in their forties, but it doesn't delve into why we're fixated.  Are we afraid to ask?