Mary Valle: My favorite cheek-shaved, neck-bearded Catholic convert, Ross Douthat, weighs in today (sort of? His columns seem to consistently defy “logic” and “making a point”) on abortion and infertility. Citing a recent MTV broadcast of a show in which a teen mother has an abortion, an article about how years of Pill usage makes women forget about their fertility, and last Sunday’s spectacular about the making of very special “twiblings” in his own paper, he ends with a little sniffy blort about America’s unborn — “No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.” In his imagination, abortion has caused an adoption gap which would fulfill all the desires of the midlife infertiles and their complicated baby-making plans.
I must admit I was totally annoyed by the Sunday magazine saga of the “twiblings” — but more by the author’s tone than anything. It seemed showoffy, statusy — “Looky! I made a blue-eyed instant family by coralling an egg donor and two “gestational carriers” to do my bidding! I am the Queen of the White Upper Middle-Class Universe!!!!!!!” But Ross, please don’t stick your snout where it is not wanted. Pregnancy is complicated in the best of circumstances. I’ve only been pregnant once in my entire life (thanks to the Pill) but didn’t tell anyone until I was 20 weeks along because I was going to abort if there were genetic malfunctions in the fetus, who is now my seven-year-old daughter. Even wanted pregnancies are sometimes not wanted.
Maybe we could set up some kind of new, nationwide “unmarried mother” chain of Douthat Farms where “ignorant” teens cool their heels and take their fish oil and not eat Pizza Hut (some of the worries of the twiblings’ mother re: her surrogate children) and hand over their babies to waiting, infertile, 40ish ladies, who are, of course, married to persons of the opposite sex. Everybody wins!