March 9th, 2009, 8 Comments »
Sometimes odd questions occur to me. I write them down, and, by asking people or the Internet, try to learn the answer. This is one such question:
I wrote it on a piece of cardboard, and it subsequently went through the wash.
This question was easy to answer, courtesy of Wikipedia:
At least ten children have been born in West Antarctica. The first was Emilio Marcos Palma, born on January 7, 1978 to Argentine parents at Esperanza, Hope Bay, near the tip of the Antarctic peninsula. In 1984, Juan Pablo Camacho was born at the Presidente Eduardo Frei Montalva Base, becoming the first Chilean born in Antarctica. Soon after, a girl, Gisella, was born at the same station. In 2001, National Geographic reported that eight children had been born at Esperanza alone.
As you might expect, a baby born in Antarctica doesn’t get an Antarctic passport–there’s no such thing. Instead, they receive their parents’ nationality. What happens if their parents come from different nations? I’m not sure.
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May 30th, 2008, 14 Comments »
I’m not going to judge you for caring about celebrities. They’re about as meaningless and stupidly aspirational as sports, and I’m a big ice hockey fan.
However, I find the intense interest in celebrity’s children appalling. I was reminded of this the other day when I saw the oddly-named baby of someone famous on the cover of People magazine. And today, I read on TechCrunch that, coincidentally, People.com has bought Celebrity Baby Blog for an undisclosed sum:
Celebrity Baby is FM Publishing’s top parenting blog, and has recently started to pull in more pageviews (and thus advertising impressions) than FM stalwart BoingBoing. Since February its traffic has shot up—to 6.9 million pageviews and 720,000 unique visitors in April, according to comScore. That month, BoingBoing had more unique visitors (2 million), but fewer pageviews (3.7 million).
Why do I find this so heinous? Because I think children have rights to their own privacy, even before they’re mature enough to exercise them. I find it morally corrupt to exploit toddlers in order to serve advertising to the multitudes. It’s reflective of the shallowest, most fickle tastes of our society. If only we could take a fraction of the cognitive surplus we waste on our worst devices and turn it to more admirable pursuits.
I’m not sure how to distribute the blame, but I’m certain that everyone–celebrities, paparazzi, publishers and consumers–is culpable. It’s obviously not climate change or poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, but it still rankles me. If you’re a consumer of celebrity gossip, I urge you to skip the baby pages.
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March 6th, 2008, 17 Comments »
I recently read about two new-to-me innovations related to reproduction. First, Slate has a piece discussing the emergence of at-home prenatal test kits that enable you to determine the gender of a fetus as early as five weeks:
Kaplan’s reporting shows how the abortion option looms behind these tests. The Jains considered abortion but decided against it. Another woman “wanted a girl so badly that she and her husband spent $25,000 on in-vitro fertilization so that doctors could select female embryos to implant in her womb.” The woman took a test at 10 weeks to make sure she wasn’t carrying a male fetus. A third woman who got a bogus result from her test says “there are women out there who experience really big disappointment. They really want to give their husbands the little boy they want, or a little girl, and they will abort based on these results.”
One example of these tests is Baby Gender Mentor (kind of a misuse of ‘mentor’ there, eh?).
The Slate piece is actually about how ordinary it’s becoming to abort a fetus because it’s of the undesired gender (boy, did I struggle over the grammar of that sentence). I’m pro-choice, but I’d prefer if people didn’t use abortion as everyday birth control, particularly when the reason is as trivial as “I wanted a boy”. I don’t have a strong rationale for my feelings, but to do so seems paltry, and flawed at some fundamental biological level.
Your (Surrogate) Mother in India
The second innovation is described in (the awesomely-named) Amelia Gentleman’s article about commercial surrogacy in India:
Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe in recent months, as word spreads of India’s combination of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.
Westerners pay about US $25,000 to get a (sometimes illiterate) Indian woman to carry their baby to term. Sometimes there’s an egg donor involved as well. The surrogate mother gets about $7500. For comparison, the average accountant in India earns about $5900 a year.
One such clinic is Rotunda - The Center for Human Reproduction, at the non-encouraging URL of www.iwannagetpregnant.com.
The article is imperfect. I think profiling a gay couple needlessly complicates the ethical debate, and there’s no discussion of whether the surrogate mothers suffer any social stigma for their participation. Plus, I was left wondering about the possible physical and psychological risks to the mothers.
Halfway through, the piece gets downright eerie:
In Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate mothers are currently pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them are living together in a hostel attached to the clinic there, waiting to give birth.
The phrase that Ms. Gentleman avoids (probably wisely) is “baby farm”. I’m reminded of The Matrix, or Cylon baby farms in Battlestar Galactica.
Who is this service for? Couples who will not or cannot adopt. I gather adoption is more costly and probably more difficult. There’s obviously the ol’ ‘replicate myself’ impulse as well. And, though I have no idea how prevalent this attitude is, parents may want a child that, in terms of race, looks like them.
I’d like to see a little survey of the Westerners who use this service, examining why they chose commercial surrogacy instead of adoption or local surrogacy via a friend or family.
The possibilities and practices of reproduction are changing incredibly fast, and I’m not sure we’re having enough thoughtful debate about these new permutations. Lots of things cloud the debate–parents’ eagerness, commercial interests, taboos, and so forth. I have more questions than answers on these topics, but I think we need to talk about them more out in the open.
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June 25th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Was a dark stormy night
As the train rattled on
All the passengers had gone to bed
Except a young man with a baby in his arms
Who sat there with a bowed-down head.
The innocent one began crying just then
As though its poor heart would break
One angry man said, “Make that child stop its noise
For it’s keeping all of us awake.”
“In The Baggage Coach Ahead”, Gussie Davis
I heard it on John Mellancamp’s Scarecrow
Until the age of 30, I’d never held a baby. Yes, I was disinclined, but in truth there were very few babies around to hold. Before that age, none of my relatives or friends had children. With a couple of exceptions, that extends to Julie’s friends as well.
Over the past three years, I’ve had the chance to spend time with a half-dozen different babies. Here’s something I hadn’t realized about babies: they cry a lot less than I thought.
In pop culture–books, movies, television, music–babies cry. That’s what they do. Their job is usually to heighten the tension of a scene, and they do that (or, rather, the sound man does that) by wailing like a mortally-wounded wildebeest. Alternately, they provide comic relief, but I can’t say I find babies particularly funny.
Having spent thirty years being told that babies cry constantly, it’s been a pleasant surprise to go hours or days in their presence with barely a whine.
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