by Liz of Inventing My Life
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about nature vs. nurture, genetics vs. environment. When I first started thinking seriously about becoming a single mother, I was really leaning more toward getting pregnant on my own through donor sperm. For one thing, I thought I wouldn’t be able to afford adoption, but I ultimately decided against getting pregnant for a few reasons: a) at my age it would probably be difficult to conceive, b) there would be a lot of icky medical hoops to jump through to make it happen, c) it could turn out to be just as expensive as adoption when you figure in the cost of multiple sperm samples and the fact that health insurance often doesn’t cover artificial insemination or fertility treatments for single women. Plus, if you want to know the truth, the whole being pregnant and giving birth thing just really creeps me out. I definitely don’t take after my mother, who popped out six kids without batting an eye, the last one when she was 40; I am more like my father, who was nowhere even near the delivery room, let alone actually in it, for the birth of any of his children – he was mostly in the bathroom with his hands over his ears so he wouldn’t hear the screaming from the other women in labor, and on at least one occasion was asked by the hospital staff to leave the waiting area because he was making all the other expectant fathers jittery. And this occasion was not the birth of his first child – me – because I remember hearing about it once my mother was home from the hospital with one of my siblings, and the only siblings that I can remember being born are #5 and #6.
But for a while, I was willing to put aside my aversion to icky medical stuff in order to get pregnant and have a child who would be genetically related to me. My reasoning was that I have some pretty good genes – no major health issues in my family, we’re all pretty intelligent, etc. – so why not do the world a favor and pass those pretty good genes along to another generation? I was afraid that there would be too much risk in adopting a child. I have to admit the thought that went through my head was, what if the child turned out to be not that bright? And I don’t mean “not that bright” as in having developmental delays and needing special education, I mean “not that bright” as in not getting a perfect score on the SATs. Have I mentioned that everyone in my family is pretty intelligent? I just wasn’t sure how I could relate to a child who didn’t fit my definition of “intelligent”.
Then I started reading stories of women who became single mothers via the icky-medical-stuff route, and I realized that there are no guarantees in life about anything. Especially given my age, there were all sorts of risks involved with trying to get pregnant. I started to think it was a miracle that any healthy and intelligent babies are born at all! Not to mention the fact that my “pretty good genes” would only be half of the genetic material. I began to realize that ending up with a child who didn’t get a perfect score on the SATs was not the worst thing that could happen. And given a choice between an uncertain outcome from a bunch of icky medical procedures and a slightly less uncertain outcome from a long and expensive but not physically icky process, I chose adoption.
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