The Ultimate Gift

An excerpt from The New York Times Magazine...

Her Body, My Baby
by Alex Kuczynski

The previous winter, a Catholic priest, upon hearing of our impending birth and my plans to raise the boy in the same liberal Catholic tradition in which I was raised, sniffed and said to me, “You know, the church frowns on science babies.”

After the birth, his comment struck me as terribly misguided. In my way of thinking, science is the ultimate expression of nature; nature and science derive from the divine.

On Easter, I spoke to the parish life director of our church in Idaho. She swept her hands across the congregation and looked me in the eye. “Every child is a gift from God,” she said. Then she added that without technology and turkey basters, half the children poking through the snow for pastel-colored eggs probably wouldn’t exist....

I was sitting on our back porch in Southampton, N.Y. The baby was asleep. It was twilight. Suddenly, my chest seized, and electric impulses pricked at my skin. What had we done? Was it right to have circumvented the natural order of things? Why had I been chosen to miss out on the act of giving birth, to be left out of the circle of life?

My husband came out and sat next to me. He took my hand.

“You gave birth to our baby,” he told me. “The doctors went in and took our baby out of you 10 months ago.” He was casting back to the day the doctor removed my eggs. “It was like a C-section. They just went in and got him when he was very small. And now he is here, and as much a part of you as if he had come out of your body. Because he did come out of your body.”

I recognized this version as a convenient twisting of logic. But it was true in its small, important way. Our child did come out of me, from us. Our bodies were married in a glass dish, and our boy was carried by another woman for nine months. He is our most vivid dream realized — the embodiment of the most blindly powerful force in the universe, brought to life the only way he could be. With a little help.

Read the whole article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30Surrogate-t.html?_r=1

It takes a lot of love and divine blessing to have a baby in "not the usual way." Infertility is a great sorrow and a great gift. Even the worst parts of parenthood will be cherished, for it may have never come to be at all. And for all of that, you're eternally grateful.