Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

The Cost of Children

According to an article in this morning’s LA Times, the cost of raising a child has increased by 22% since 1960. The grand total for raising one child from birth to age 17 is now $222, 360.

For one child.

Before college.

So, the question is, what are you going to do with your spare quarter-million dollars?

Unfortunately, mine isn’t sitting around waiting to be spent, but if it were, I’d be writing tomorrow’s post from the coast of Madagascar, next week’s from the top of a camel in the Sahara, and the following week’s from the Great Wall of China. A quick word or two posted from the base camp of Everest, and then I’d probably have to come home for a while, if only to do laundry. I could use a new car to be honest, and I probably ought to save part of it for a down-payment on a house, but as I’d once anticipated having four children, I have the best part of a million dollars to spend all on myself.

Yes, this is a silly fantasy, but just for a moment, play along with me. How would you spend the $222,360 you saved by not having children?

Justifying the Decision to Remain Childless

After posting yesterday’s article about surrogates in India, I came across this Op-Ed piece about a study that looked at the emotional impact on children conceived through sperm and egg donation. Here’s what the researchers found:

“a population that’s at once grateful to the fertility industry and uneasy about the way they were conceived, supportive of assisted fertility but haunted by the feeling of being a bought-and-paid-for child.

Americans conceived through sperm donation also are more likely to feel alienated from their immediate family than either biological or adopted children. They’re twice as likely as adoptees to report envying peers who knew their biological parents, twice as likely to worry that their parents “might have lied to me about important matters” and three times as likely to report feeling “confused about who is a member of my family and who is not.”

And the realities of commercialized reproduction — in which desirable donors can father dozens of children by different mothers, creating far-flung networks of half-siblings who will never know each other — weigh heavily on them. They are more likely than adoptees to say that “when I see someone who resembles me, I often wonder if we are related,” for instance, and much more likely to worry about accidentally falling into a romantic relationship with a relative.”

I found this fascinating and wonder how many parents consider this, and if it’s just one of those issues that will need to be dealt with if and when it arises. I know that when I was faced with the possibility of first sperm and later egg donation, these findings didn’t occur to me. Something didn’t feel right to me, but that’s all that I really knew.

I think that now I am probably looking for justification of my decision to not have a baby by any possible means, but if so, I’m having no trouble finding evidence to support my case.

NY Times: India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood

This story makes my head spin. I need to pick a corner and say something about this, but there are so many corners to choose from, I’m going in circles.

On the one hand, I keep trying to convince myself that these women in India are happily carrying babies for wealthy Westerners because the $7,500 they’ll receive will give their own families a better life. The latter is true. It could take these women three years to earn $7,500 in a normal job. But “exploitation” is a word that won’t stay out of my mind. Would these women do this job if they weren’t desperate? There’s a whole list of exploitive ways for women to make money when they’re up against a wall. Is this job anything more than prostitution?

And of the people who use the service. Some claim they are ordinary people who couldn’t afford the $75,000 it would cost to use a U.S. surrogate; some are getting around their own country’s laws; others are just looking for a bargain. They’re all buying babies.

But I understand that maniac desire for a child; I can see how someone could see this as perfectly acceptable.

OK, I’m picking my corner now.

This is madness, utter insanity. This unbridled quest for motherhood is totally out of control. We live on an overpopulated planet; we have unwanted children all over the place, so why are we going to such extremes to create more? This has become absolute mania and at some point this bubble is going to pop. Just as the stock market had a meltdown and just as the real estate market blew itself up, I predict that somewhere down the line, the baby market is going to self-destruct. And it’s going to be a horrible unhappy mess when it does.

OK, I’m done. Going back to my room now.