The attempt to control biology is not merely a personal choice based on scienfic or medical possibility. Loads of things are possible, some are probable but that doesn't make them reasonable, acceptable or morally correct. This isn't a question of making a difficult moral choice about having a child, but a question about the morality of twisting biology for individual vanity.

I have some qualms about IVF. I can't imagine that toying with hormones to override something as delicately balanced and intricate as the reproductive system doesn't have serious consequences. The physical ones will come to light over time.

There are already social consequences. Unused embryos are political footballs. People believe IVF is a right. Medical procedures - abortion and assisted suicide, for example - are evaulated in public in broad, simplistic terms rather than viewed in a particular, perhaps representative but not necessarily encompassing, context.

Being an adult means adjusting your expectations and your dreams according to reality. A healthy 60-year-old body has limitations that a healthy 40-year-old, a healthy 20-year-old body does not. We age more slowly because modern lives are not as physically demanding and dangerous as they were even fifty years ago. Science and medicine have advanced, but not so far as to be able to erase time.

A 60-year-old woman having her fifth child because she wants to be a mommy again is behaving like a spoiled brat kid. By wanting and by being willing to go through this expensive, dramatic procedure, she demonstrates the very qualities that make her a poor mother. If she really wanted to mother a child, she could have used the money to adopt a child or take in a foster child. But it's not about the child, it's about her.

Some of the letters to Salon.com find this story a validation of personal desires. There again is vanity. Desires are fluid, narcissistic; they are not to be relied upon as moral arbiters or seen as a basis for sound judgment.

Desires are wishes, hopes and regrets, the ephemeral stuff of humanity. Unmitigated desire is socially and individually oppressive. Americans have acquired a luxurious standard of living which includes a self-centered notion of personal fulfillment. "I want, therefore I should have." It is greed disguised as need.

I was just going about my normal Sunday morning feminist ritual of praying to Wiccan godesses, brewing up poison and putting men at risk when I read Parker's column. I never knew ignorance could be so enlightening!

I'm sorry, did I write "enlightening?" I meant to say, "rewarded."

How does a black hole of misinformation like Ms. Parker and her ilk - Caitlin Flanaghan, Ann Coulter and Salon's own Camille Paglia - create a vortex of positive attention? Prestigious organizations are paying these people to be intentionally ignorant and stupid. Why?

Are facts no longer worth checking? Assumptions no longer worth challenging? Have journalistic standards fallen so low as to misinterpret screeching as discourse? Not all opinions are equally valid, yet simply taking an obtuse angle on some current issue seems to guarantee a podium or at least a cauldron to conjure up some poisonous diatribes.

...first wife, first set of kids, etc.

This is an almost amusing "been there, done that" story about kids and about that young wife who has now become young mom. She's mostly absent from the story because regarding young women's place in the home, the author has "been there, done that" already too. What did he think would happen when he tried to recapitulate his youth from the perspective of 50 years experience?

Not every parent, not every adult is charmed by children. The newness of everything so exciting to developing minds has, for grown ups, long since passed into sometimes jaded acceptance of reality. The patience and physical stamina required to cope with youngsters diminishes as we have to make choices about how to spend the limited resources of later life. This is called maturity.

What makes this discovery so earthshaking for Mr. Asa Rose is the underlying selfishness evident in his first sentence. It's wrapped in an insistence that the author loves all these people, that he "holds them more dear than life itself," but the story has to do not with his amusement at his expectations, but with his disappointment that reality is like the floor he falls on when he steps on toys, hard and difficult to rise above.

The thing is, life and love hardly ever requires Asa Rose's conflated sense of heroism. Mostly love is in mundane details, cleaning the kitchen after dinner and putting the kids to bed has exhausted you, working at a job for money just to keep the house or buy groceries. Love that survies dreary obligations is less easily discussed.

This article tries to justify an aging man's disinterest in youth except as it fails in his fantasy of regaining it through a second family. It's kind of pathetic that Asa Rose wasn't engaged enough the first time around to realize that child rearing has great swaths of boredom and a lot of focus on bugs.