No, women can't have it all

Modern feminism and the predatory reproductive technology industry have sold us a lie.

Earlier this month, 40-year-old comedian Whitney Cummings told Yahoo Life she froze her eggs in her 30s as an "insurance policy." She framed this decision as an empowering way to “take control of her reproductive health.” As women become evermore independent in the West, using reproductive technologies to “extend” our reproductive capacities and years has become increasingly popular.

But as we are learning, modern interpretations of “women’s liberation” can have adverse results.

Third wave feminism brought us “sex work is work,” “transwomen are women,” and morphed “my body my choice” into a defense of women’s “right” to self-objectify or to “be a slut.”

In recent decades, we have also arrived to a place where women are told they can have babies whenever they like — no need to put your career on hold or focus on trying to find an appropriate partner during your most fertile years. Women can do what they like, consequence-free — it is our right. This is what third wave feminism has sold us, in any case.

And while I don’t believe women need prioritize marriage and babies as though it is their sole route to happiness — I have not, and am exceeding free and happy with my choices — the truth is that women can’t have it all. We do have to make choices, and there are limitations attached to those choices.

You can’t make your career and freedom your top priority and also be a mother. Becoming a mother does limit your freedom — you can no longer do whatever you like, you must put someone else first (i.e. your child or children). Wealthy women may well pawn off motherhood onto other women, but surely there are consequences for all parties in that situation.

The more common lie sold to women today is that they can wait until their 40s to have children — choose your career, your carefree life, your unserious boyfriends — you have lots of time, no pressure, don’t let old-fashioned ideas about nature hold you back!

I am all for choosing freedom and fun, if that’s what you want. The idea of interrupting mine with children is deeply unappealing, which is why I chose to keep babies out of my way. But if what you want is a family and kids, you do need to be more realistic.

The truth, as unliberating as it may sound, is that you can’t wait until the most convenient time for you and guarantee you will still be able to produce a child (or produce a child right at that moment, when most convenient). Yes, women are having babies much later in life than before, but having a baby in your 40s or later is a rarity, not a right.

Cummings’ belief that freezing her eggs is “an insurance policy,” guaranteeing she can avoid pregnancy until her mid-40s — when it is more convenient for her, financially, career-wise, relationship-wise, and otherwise — is a sad lie told to her by an industry that is playing dangerous and disappointing games with nature. And while it is one thing for Cummings to believe it (though that belief may result in a rude awakening), it is another to advertise that lie to other women, equally as naive, duping them into a very expensive disappointment.

Freezing your eggs will cost you tens of thousands of dollars, and offers no guarantee that, once you are in your 40s and feeling ready to have kids, you will actually be able to get pregnant. At that point, the odds are working against you, biologically. Available eggs or not, the chances of getting pregnant past 40 are low, miscarriage becomes a higher risk, and complications for you or the fetus become more likely.

My point is not to discourage women from having kids in their 40s — if you can, great. Theoretically, it seems an ideal time to me — you probably are more stable financially (and emotionally), better equipped to choose a good/compatible partner, more mature, less interested in partying, wiser, ready to settle down, and so on and so forth. But pitting convenience and theory against nature is a bad idea. If you do want kids, it is unwise to wait that long.

But hey! You might think. If I’m too old to make use of my frozen eggs, I’ll just stick ‘em in a more viable container to fertilize.

Fuck you.

I’m serious. While I have some empathy for the deluded woman who believes freezing her eggs will guarantee her the ability to “have it all,” I have next to none for the one who hires a surrogate.

This past week, we saw Khloe Kardashian cradling “her” newborn in a hospital bed. Season two of The Kardashians began with an announcement: “I am having another baby.” The episode shows Khloe struggling, having discovered her now-ex boyfriend, Tristan Thompson, had cheated on her yet again, impregnating another woman who gave birth to their child in December. Khloe says, “I am going through my pregnancy without a partner.” And indeed the situation would be a dark one for any woman, but the thing is: she wasn’t pregnant and she wasn’t having a baby. Another woman went through a pregnancy and had a baby. That woman is erased in order for Khloe and her family to maintain their delusion that somehow implanting an egg inside another human, then paying that woman for the right to take the baby she gestated and birthed from her, equates to Khloe “having a baby.”

After Khloe’s doctor told her she could have a “high-risk pregnancy,” and that miscarriage was a high probability, she and Thompson decided to hire a surrogate, transferring an an embryo in November. The invisible mother gave birth on July 28th.

According to Khloe’s sister, Kim, the “process” is that when the baby is born it will immediately be handed off to Khloe. Kim, who has paid for two children via surrogate, describes being in the hospital room with her surrogate: “I’m in a gown too, and then the baby comes on me.”

Can you imagine giving birth to a baby, then the baby being immediately taken, another woman pretending she gave birth to it, and is the natural mother? It seems unfathomably cruel and an extension of all the various lies sold to us in today’s 1984-themed world.

During that first episode, the whole Kardashian family seem concerned that Khloe seems “detached” from the process, as though they are unaware that she is quite literally detached. The mother-baby bond is an incredibly powerful thing — for a reason — and to attempt to trick yourself into believing that doesn’t exist because it is your egg, and because you paid this woman to hand off her baby to you, strikes me as insane. Undoubtedly most fathers know their female partner shares a particular bond with the baby in the womb, and has an extremely different, more visceral experience.

Khloe isn’t excited about the baby coming in part because her partner deceived her, and the family life she imagined no longer exists (she is also distracted by the trauma and sadness of the situation), but also because she isn’t experiencing any of the natural, biological experiences that create the mother-baby bond. The experiences that would make her feel attached and viscerally aware of that life.

I can’t know, first-hand, what that feels like, but I know that gestating your baby is a powerful and crucial part of the psychological, emotional, and physical health of mother and baby. Surrogacy strikes me as inherently traumatic to mother and baby.

This is not to say that women (and men) cannot love and be incredible parents to children that are not biologically theirs. Of course this is true for countless people. But to choose this process — to impose these psychological, emotional, and physical harms on women and children, unnecessarily — seems cruel and dangerously dystopian.

We are living in a time wherein we believe technology can beat nature: men can become women; we can form healthy, intimate relationships on apps; and we can cheat time. Fertile or not — even woman or not — anyone, we seem to believe, can get pregnant and give birth.

But the truth is not only that only women can get pregnant, but that some women will not be able to get pregnant. Some may miss their window, some may have conditions or risk-factors that prevent it. This isn’t the end of the world — it is reality, which is not perfect.

Cummings describes a sense of “freedom” after freezing her eggs, feeling less rushed to find a good partner. “[It] made me feel like I got another 10 years back. It took weight off,” she explains. The comedian acknowledges there is something “elitist” about this, referring to the incredible expense attached to these kinds of reproductive technologies. And she’s right: it is elitist. Even more so when we are talking about rich women (or men) paying poor women to birth children for them, which is the case in surrogacy hubs like India and Thailand.

The solution isn’t, as Cummings suggests, to ensure these kinds of reproductive technologies are more accessible — “covered by insurance," she suggests. It is to get real about your body and life.

Telling women they can “have it all” — that they can wait indefinitely to have kids — is a damaging lie. And any person who believes they have a “right” to a baby is an entitled, ignorant, selfish person.

We can’t beat nature. Life and death exist as they do for reasons beyond our control, our desires, and our politics.

I intentionally built a life without kids. I never really wanted them (nor did I ever care about marriage). Not when I was 17, not now. But if you do know this is something you want — or if you think babies are something you might like the option to have in the future, don’t fool yourself into believing you can fuck around until you’re 45 and then — voila — insta-baby.

The idea that women should not and will not have to give up anything in theirs lives to have it all has created a harmful sense of entitlement.

Modern feminism and predatory, exploitative industries are selling dehumanization under the guise of aid. Don’t be fooled.