I wonder if we are not also imbibing a subtler, far less liberating message. That anything less than motherhood is tragedy.

I find this one of the most distressing backslides of the last couple of decades - the re-fetishization of motherhood. One of the most liberating of ideas is that of the non-primacy of reproduction. If you're female, there's no law that says you must reproduce in order to be a "real woman". Yet somehow, our mass media has slid back into presenting motherhood as the absolute best option, and prattling about how being a mom is the "most rewarding" and "hardest" job there is.

While it's understandable that those who have taken this course might say that, to present it as a foregone conclusion just because mothers might believe it is pretty fatuous. More and more, the women I meet who have no children are perfectly happy that way; many, if not most, throw their hands up in horror at the idea of having kids of their own.

The problem, in my view, is indoctrination. We get this message blasted at us from infancy, and it's almost impossible to escape it. The very fact that most people live in nuclear families, where there is little incidence of day-to-day contact with family members who are not and will not be parents, contributes to the idea that women who don't have kids are strange or pitiable. There is no alternative (or very little) presented in education, either. Girls are not taught to examine themselves carefully, to ponder with an open mind whether they are actually suited to motherhood. Not everyone is, you know.

My own decision not to have kids came about through years of contemplation, and working at a county child-care subsidy program pretty much put the nail in the coffin. I saw many women come through those doors who clearly should not have had children, not because they were poor, but because they could have had far more fulfilling, rewarding lives on their own. Unfortunately, many pregnancies happen by accident, or often because they simply thought it was the only way to keep a man, or prevent loneliness, or fulfill their own parents' expectations. Add to this the ugly legal trend of making abortion and contraception difficult if not impossible to obtain, and you're basically condemning many women whose talents lie in different areas to lives of servitude.

Don't get me wrong. There are many, if not most, women who are very good at being moms. There's obviously nothing whatsoever wrong with that. My concern is for those many women who jump into it for the wrong reasons, or are trapped into it by circumstance and indoctrination. Think of how many young girls might have demanding, fulfilling lives in professions that leave no room for motherhood, but end up with those possiblities either squashed or never realized at all. And think of how many women do go into such careers, but end up frustrated or unhappy because they can't find room for something they might never have wanted had society not rammed its notions of the necessity of reproduction into their heads. Or they give it a go and find themselves exhausted, stressed and unhappy due to that same pressure. More than a few of those "motherhood is everything!" attitudes smack to me of a kind of defensive shielding - if they yell it loud enough, they might actually manage to convince themselves it's true, and they aren't drowning.

The best of all worlds would be one in which girls were taught to think about this carefully, the society at large accepted and praised women who went their own way on their own, women were not set at loggerheads to each other over whether they did or did not reproduce, and could be happy with whatever choice they did decide on. But I'm a dreamer that way.

Oh, I certainly sympathize with women who find out they can't have children. Finding out that your body isn't ever going to do something that the vast majority of other bodies can do can be pretty devastating, of course. But I also believe that if motherhood were not pushed as the be-all and end-all of being a woman, that decision might not be quite so devastating. If girls were brought up from infancy to see motherhood as just one way to fulfill their lives, one way to be female, then a development like that would be a sorrow, sure, but not the kind of soul-threatening crisis it often is now.

And actually, I have nothing against the women in the original post. I think it's admirably generous for the mother to do what she did for the daughter, especially if it's done as a "just in case" rather than a guilt-trip on her daughter. (You POOR thing! Here are my eggs, which I sacrificed for you so that you may be a REAL WOMAN!) Even though I would personally prefer to see a world where that daughter would feel just as happy to adopt a child, given her inability to reproduce, as go to such technical, and possibly disappointing, lengths just to have a particular genetic strain in her children.

But this comes back again to social indoctrination. This world is jam-packed with people, and now we're finally beginning to accept that such overpopulation is on its way to killing off our biosphere. In the coming decades, it would behoove us to stop being so centered on reproducing our personal genetic mix, and start thinking about the world as a whole. Along with all the other things I mentioned, we can't keep reproducing at this pace and expect to survive as a species, let alone as particular families or clan groups. Teaching kids from the beginning that there are viable, perfectly good alternatives to reproduction is one of the things that might just stave off the coming troubles.