Letters to the Editor
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@anonymous
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.