What they should be saying is: “if there is a method that would enable me to have a child, then I have the right to try it”. The right they have, if at all, is to the method of conception, and not to the child that may result – and even that is debatable. In fact, it is being debated right now.
There have been various “true confessions” of women who think that it is a tragedy that they cannot have a child. From the way they carry on, you would think they had been diagnosed with fatal cancer or full-blown AIDS and were facing imminent death. Instead of tugging at my heart-strings, they only end up tugging at my nerve-ends.
Whenever I read about or hear anybody whining about something they can’t have, be it a baby or a Mercedes or a world cruise, I just feel disgusted. I can’t stand foot-stamping petulance, particularly when it’s on public display. Its place, if place it has, is in the privacy of the bedroom, preferably with the door locked.
If all those who endure personal sorrow and grief were to install themselves in the public square to “share” it with us, where would we be? Drowning in nausea, I assume.
To be unable to have a child is not a tragedy; to lose a child is. To grieve over something you don’t have, rather than over something you did have but have lost, smacks of spoilt sulking and it is very unattractive. Besides, there are far graver sorrows and those who bear them are without the urge to wail in public. Usually, the greater the sorrow, the more private it is.
When I hear people demanding a child for themselves as though it were an acquisition or something that might become a personal possession, I fear the outcome for the child that may be born. I am not talking here about those sensible people who approach IVF with a well-balanced outlook, or who rule it out altogether and generously adopt a child instead. I am talking about those women whose approach to wanting a child verges on the hysterical and unbalanced, taking over their entire world. How does this happen to a woman? It’s almost frightening.
These people do not seem to realise that the world is full of people who do not have children – not necessarily because they do not want them, but because the circumstances of their lives were not right for child-rearing, and so they responsibly took a decision against it.
There are very many single women, in Malta too, who have no children because they never found the right man, or when they did, it was too late. They did not reach the age of 30 and think: “It’s now or never. Man or no man, I have the right to have a child,” and then set about having one with the aid of donated sperm or a quick and perfectly-timed roll in the hay with a stranger.
Yes, there are women who have done that, and good luck to them, but there are more women who have not. They, too, wanted children, and some of them wanted children, a home and a loving partner, too, and very badly indeed. But unlike so many of the married women who are dealing with infertility, they know that “the right to a child” doesn’t come into it. The trouble with us is that we have begun to confuse “wants” with “rights”.
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The notion of the right to a child is a dangerous one. People become confused over this because they somehow think that human rights are involved. They are not. The human right they are thinking of is the right to form a family. This does not translate into the right to have a child and to keep that child under any circumstances – that should be obvious.
It simply means that the state or authorities that represent it cannot prevent people from forming families by, for example, banning marriage or cohabitation, forcibly sterilising people, breaking up homes, forcing women to abort, and not allowing people to have children.
It does not mean that the state should bend over backwards to ensure that infertile couples get all the fertility treatment under the sun, and ignore the best interests of the child that may be born. Nor does it mean that infertile couples have a right to IVF.
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The suffering of the unmarried woman who is denied a child because she cannot raise it alone is no less great than that of the married one who is infertile. In fact, it is probably greater, because the unmarried woman might very well be able to conceive, but does not because she is not in a position to look after a child.
Yet you never see a woman like this tearing her hair out and accusing society, the gods and the government of denying her the right to a husband and a child. Society does not accept the grief of the unmarried woman who desperately wants a child but will not have one. It only accepts the grief of the woman who thinks that just because she is married, she has a “right” to a child.
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Children are not “things” or possessions placed on earth for our delight and amusement; they are entirely separate individuals who may turn out to bear no relation to us in appearance, character or personality. The drive to recreate ourselves is confounded when they turn out looking and behaving like a remote ancestor of whom we may be entirely unaware – particularly if the remote ancestor is on the other side of the family, and even more so if the sperm to produce the child came from some unknown quantity who made a donation to a sperm-bank.
The craving for a child is biological, but in reality it means nothing. Its only significance is in persuading us to reproduce, for otherwise, we would not – and there are several countries in which the craving for a child is not even enough to overwhelm the inclination not to reproduce, most notoriously in Italy. A woman who thinks she wants a child so as to fulfil herself, and that this child will be an endless source of joy and amusement has a nasty shock coming to her.
Any attempt to turn the child into a toy or into the mother’s creature is going to be fiercely resisted – by the child. Psychologically healthy children develop a strong sense of autonomy at a fairly early age, and fight against any attempt at assimilation by their parents. If the child has too weak a personality to resist, then he or she will grow up badly damaged.
The biggest risk that I see with women who believe that it is their right to have a child by whatever means – men are not so bad, and are usually driven into the mess by their wives – is that they are less able to take to parenting naturally. The child, a special project before it is born, stays a special project after it comes out into the light. It will probably stay a special project until it can fight its way free and leave home. If he or she does not achieve personal salvation by doing so, then he or she will end up in one of those sad co-dependent relationships that we sometimes see between middle-aged “children” (who are usually and inevitably unmarried) and their mothers.
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But then again, you can’t legislate against this sort of behaviour. It’s a free country, thank God. To those women who think that a baby is the solution to all their cravings, desires and problems, I have one message: it isn’t. A baby is not there to make you whole. I would also add that they should count themselves lucky that they are at least blessed with a life-partner. Many other women don’t have even that. They have no partner, no husband and they are not sulking and making scenes about it. Fortunately, no one has yet interpreted the human right to form a family as their God-given, state-provided right to a life-partner, though I imagine it is only a matter of time. I hope I am long gone by then.