WHO'S YOUR MAMA?

The recent catastrophic earthquake in Nepal revealed something few had suspected.  Gay men who had used an intricate international system to traffic ovum, using their own semen to create children, were trapped in front of their Nepal hotel as they tried to fly home with the new child. 

Conventional Israeli couples who want children were unable to use the newest technology in their own country because that nation is a theocracy, dominated by the principles of Judaism of long ago.  Therefore, parents froze ova of that woman or another, shipped them to Thailand where the man’s frozen semen (actually just the healthiest seeming sperm) was injected into the ova in vitro, the resulting zygote then shipped to Nepal where a surrogate mother carried the baby to term.  Presumably, the checkbook parents then raised the infant to bond with them and sustain the family continuity.  If you can call it that.  The cost is about $50,000.  

There are few ancient tribal prohibition about being rich or what money is used for -- at least until Jesus.  But the ancient tribal obsession with genetic inheritance is still in play, working against adoption.  There are “tribal” prohibitions on homosexuality, though they are being challenged.   Tribes want members. 

The fact of harmful mutations accumulating in closed natural communities is only considered at the molecular level -- like, how to jigger the faulty gene while preserving the parent genome, but now research suggests that parent genomes change in the transfer and ensuing environment more than we ever suspected, beyond the changes in the original mix-and-match of male and female.

Below is an interesting example of a conservative Jew wrestling with the situation.  http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/moshe-feiglin/surrogate-motherhood-and-nepal/2015/05/07/  When science-loving people are forced into conflict with traditional morality, it’s tough to figure out what’s right.  God laughs.  Satan only smiles -- there is more to come.

In low income USA the problem is likely to be the opposite: there is a mother but no father. (Is there any country that exports dads?  Maybe China, which gave away all its girls?)  A wicked development is the low-income mom-only baby, reluctantly conceived because the mother didn’t (maybe couldn’t) take steps to prevent either intercourse or fertility.  Once the baby is born, infanticide is pretty easy.  The other day's Great Falls Tribune had as many stories about babies murdered as about wedding anniversaries.

The baby might be breastfed because it’s cheaper, but the breast milk may be contaminated by the mother’s intake of alcohol or drugs or both.  Or bad nutrition.   Medical interventions will be VERY expensive, but paid for by the public.  The crucial nurturing of being held, warmed, kept safe, may be entirely missing.  The child may believe that all mothers are only angry or rejecting or impossibly confusing, going back and forth emotionally.   In their words, when they are old enough to express themselves, “a cunt.”

Mothers may try to make little boys assume the role of husband, even sexually, but particularly in terms of taking the brunt of poverty, rage, and social pressure.  Even in a more “normal” family a boy of a certain age, maybe long before he is ready, is expected to be “a little man,” to interface with business people by carrying messages or substances. This can be either a burden or an advantage, but a boy still in elementary school will be twisted by it.

One of the hardest twists is a boy who is supposed to be the shining light who would save the family with his brilliance, but then if things don't turn out well is blamed and thrown out.  Sometimes the whole family slides into despair and sends him away as the one most likely to survive on his own.  This is almost biological, as animals also exclude young males, esp. those who challenge the alpha male.  It is not always girls who are sold as children for purposes we don’t want to think about.  Boys are also trafficked, prostituted, tortured, forced to be soldiers or pushers, drugged.  

Some boys go to the street to escape their uncontrollable families.  Increasingly, boys are thrown out onto the street because they are gay and/or infected with HIV/AIDS or transsexual or simply defiant.  All these things are seen as endangering the family.  But a boy who quietly does sexwork might be supporting his family.  Or maybe that makes him part of a voluntary family, wicked as it might be in the eyes of the public.

Komodo Dragon

So how should we think and feel about all this?  I still haven’t digested that boys fall short in school or are demonstrably fragile emotionally.  Then there is the dismaying news that the Y chromosome, already missing one leg off what would be an X in a girl, is losing even more genes through evolution.  And all the tinkering with insemination has taught us that a little slender pipette can do the job -- no penis of any size necessary.  

No one has succeeded in creating either a human ovum or sperm without a human.  But there has been some success in causing an ovum to just begin growing on its own.  Lesser animals -- reptiles and amphibians -- can grow to completion.

Komodo dragon parthogenisis zygote

The practice of creating zygotes that are frozen against future failure to conceive has presented law with insoluble problems, like lawsuits over the “ownership” or “parenthood” of tiny cell masses -- too teeny to be split in half with Solomon’s sword -- that might or might not develop into a real baby, hopefully healthy. 

Then there is the problem of sperm donors with hundreds of descendants, some of whom will have a strange attraction to familiar others, even marrying them.  Or the doctor who runs a clinic that doesn’t bother with sperm donors since the doc himself thinks his much superior genetics (he’s a doctor, isn’t he?) is good enough for all women, populating his waiting room with babies who look just like him.

Frozen storage

The problems are hairy enough for individuals, but what about the society as a whole?  What is the law to make of so many systems that assume traditional marriage, natural conception, genetic inheritance?  Ownership, taxation, all sorts of small exemptions and prohibitions even in criminal law, like not testifying against a spouse.  (Does that include common-law marriages? or live-ins?) What happens when according to the relevant laws of parentage, there’s no allowance for a baby created with a mix of conception, gestation, delivery, nurturance, and economics.  How many parents can a child have?

People from coherent cultures that worked in other places and times are often emotionally discombobulated by new requirements imposed by quite a different system.  That means they’ll go underground and be forced into evasion of authorities.  The ambivalence of many places, like polygamous Mormon communities, don’t help.

A Mormon family

Most of the desires and decisions are out of the hands of the babies themselves.  They must simply cope with whatever happens.  If it’s damaging, the child will have to find a way to repair, if there IS any.  It’s too early to hear the stories of adults who have made the best of it.  Right?