I’ve been wanting to write something like the following for a long time but never got around to it. Now I don’t have to because blogger Flavia did it perfectly for me:
But although I absolutely do not think that it is selfish or narcissistic to decide in one’s 40s or even 50s that one wants to be a parent (or at any rate, it’s no more likely to be a sign of narcissicism than wanting children in one’s 20s or 30s is), I confess that I don’t get the desire to have one’s own biological children at all costs (I understand it as a strong preference, sure, but not as a need)–and I definitely do not understand the desire to go through pregnancy for its own sake. So I see a real difference between people in their late forties/fifties who either are lucky to get pregnant naturally, or who adopt, and those people who, because it makes them feel young and bogusly fertile and more like “real” mothers, go to great expense and incur quite extreme health risks in order to carry a child–a child not necessarily sharing any of their genetic material–to term.
I still haven’t arrived at a decision whether I want to have children. If I decide that I do, though, I will let things take their natural course. I’d never go to these great lengths that so many people go to, paying insane amounts of money and torturing their bodies with unhealthy, extremely dangerous treatments. I just can’t convince myself they are driven by love of children. There are so many lonely, miserable, abandoned children who can be fostered that no child lover would ever need to remain childless.
So if it isn’t love of children and a desire to give a good life to a child, what is it that drives people to these ruinous fertility treatments? I can’t find any other explanation than wanting to prove to some imaginary controlling agency that one is traditionally fertile and is, hence, a” real woman / man”. The danger here is that even before his or her birth, a child becomes some sort of an argument in a very weird, non-existent discussion.
Using children to reaffirm one’s masculinity or femininity in any way or manner is decidedly unhealthy. This is something that people do when they have no idea how to feel male or female through the only natural means: by practicing a healthy sexual life.
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