CD21: Warning, this post is so long that it has footnotes.

Today's subject: Why I Blame Republicans for my Infertility¹


I recently had a long and heated conversation with a dear friend, a a Democrat who is deeply committed to social justice. Distressed by the divide in our country, she called for a ratcheting down of the rhetoric of evil. Quit thinking of the Republicans as evil. They're just people like us who were raised with a different set of values. If we think of them as evil we'll never be able to talk to them.

Eminently reasonable, right? A fairly mild call to lay down arms. Who could object to that?

It turns out that I do. I know I can't have reasonable conversations with Republicans about their views. I can certainly have reasonable conversations with them about other subjects, and do every day -- but the party affiliation is an absolute conversation-killer for me.

The problem is that I take it all very personally. The Republicans are, to me, the party of institutionalized homophobia. They use the hatred of gays as a lever in the culture wars in order to advance their economic interests.²

I'm sure that as a femmey white bourgie I've suffered less than many from homophobia. But the path that led me to this blog is paved with homophobia.

I'm part of a binational gay couple. This has had a massive effect on my life: my partner of 11 years has no immigration rights on the strength of our relationship.

We were crazy in love from the moment we met, and probably would have been married within the year.³ I can't help but imagine how things could have gone differently had we lived somewhere that recognized our relationship.

Because of our immigration status, we've never had more than a few years of knowing for sure that we were going to be in the same place. I crave security like Palin craves ANWAR drilling. For the past 11 years we've shifted from one short term solution to another. I really cannot overstate how much this freaks me out. I never felt like things were stable enough to start to try to conceive. Finally, at age 33, I realized that stable or not I could put it off no longer, and that I would just have to deal with the strong possibility of moving to a strange country with a small child.

Or, as it turns out, not. I'm turning 35 soon. This has been harder than I ever imagined, and I'm fully aware that the hardest times may yet be ahead of me.

So yes. I blame homophobia for denying us the social and legal support that is so important to young families. Of course it's not totally the fault of homophobia. I could have been better and braver and bolder. If I had had that courage to start this at a younger age, uncertainty be damned, I might well be pregnant by now, like the many young lesbians I have seen zoom by me over the past few years. I save most of my blame for myself. But I reserve a portion of blame for homophobia and, by extension, for the party that has chosen to wave the homophobia flag.

SO yes. I take it personally, too personally. I take it very personally that we may soon have to sell our house (in an increasingly terrifying market) and leave the country that I love⁴. I take it personally that if I have an aneurysm in Florida, I might not be able to spend my dying minutes with the person I love the most. I take it personally that the Republicans actively oppose my creating, nurturing, or protecting my family.

I hate that homophobia has made so much of this wide, vibrant country seem small and threatening to me. Again, if I were bolder, more of a risk-taker, probably it wouldn't be so. Or if I didn't have or want a family, it'd hardly matter. Rugged individualism works great when you've only got your rugged self to protect.

And that is why I fail at civil discourse. I can't talk Republican matters without being overcome with a wave of you either think I shouldn't exist or you don't care that the rest of your party thinks I shouldn't exist. I have a special place of impatience for gay-friendly Republicans. I get it, you care about my civil liberties, you just don't care enough to quit supporting your homophobic party.

Of course, if I had my way and everyone who was gay-friendly quit the Republican party, then who would exist to change the party from within? The Log Cabin Republicans claim they're doing just that.

After having puzzled over the dilemma, I've come to the conclusion that the moral thing for those people to do would be to join the Republican party, advocate as hard as they can for Teh Gays, and then when they get to the voting booth, vote Democratic.

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¹I've gone back and forth about whether to identify myself as "infertile" when it doesn't really describe the state of being a lesbian who has so far been unable to conceive. But in the end I've decided that "infertile" describes my experience even if it doesn't describe my physical state.

²To be fair, at least some of them hate gays sincerely and not as a cynical cultural ploy.

³ After we'd been together for a week, I went away for a week. She's said that she would have applied for a marriage license during that week. I don't think I would have put up with that, though. I want a big dress.

⁴ Even though I am a Democrat.

Thinking more about effort and luck...

This thoughtful comment from the lovely & talented Lil Jimmi sparked off some additional ranting on the subject of luck and achievements:

It's true that luck plays a huge part in how all this having a baby stuff turns out, but when it comes to trying to have a "natural" birth in a US hospital it's also a lot of work.

You've get a big fight ahead of you if you want to have a low-intervention birth. Here in Philly there is just one center city hospital that does L&D because it is not profitable. They don't want you to take up a room laboring naturally. They want you in and out. You have to go in with a plan and a team to fight for you.

So yeah I feel like we were the luckiest dykes on the planet being able to get the birth experience we wanted in a hospital, but it wasn't just luck it was work too.

BF too...there's probably 10% of people who have a blissfully easy time BF, but for the other people who are lucky enough to pull it off it's a Hella lot of work.

(please note that below is inspired by but not addressed to Li'l Jimmi, who I absolutely do not believe should be slapped in any way, ever)

Excellent point! I'm in no way saying that it was easy for those who conceived without medical intervention/had their desired unmedicated birth/breast fed/etc. My darling wandered by and looked over my shoulder and, as she is wont to do, dropped a pearl of wisdom:

Lucky doesn't mean you get it for nothing. Lucky means it is within your power to get it.

See, for every person who had to work really really hard for their unmedicated birth etc, there's at least one other person who worked just as hard and still didn't get it. And there might be someone else who worked harder, and still didn't get it.

So should you be proud of your hard work? Yes, of course, just as people should be proud of their hard work no matter the outcome (although they rarely are, unless the outcome is the desired one). But the fact that the ultimate outcome went your way, well, there's a good whack of luck in there, and I think it behooves all of us who have been lucky to be grateful for our luck. My particular rant was about people who are smug about situations that required a large helping of luck, and then think that they got what they got because they're clever, never crediting their luck. En passant they often throw out a few judgey statements that make some less-lucky people feel shitty about their medical interventions/failure to breast feed/etc.

In a broader way, the physical "luck" involved in the reproductive arena is somewhat like the "luck" of social advantage and the whole myth of meritocracy. It's another arena in which people constantly attribute to virtue something that required a whack of luck.

Example: I have a couple of degrees. I had to work hard for them, yeah. But there are plenty of people out there who've worked just as hard and because they didn't have some of my luck, they don't have those degrees. Can I be proud of the work I put into my degrees? Sure! But should I be smug about them, and assert that anyone can have these degrees if they just work as hard as I did? Should I turn up my nose at the degree-less, and make remarks about how I'm just not sure it's right for all those people to be running around out there without degrees? I can, but I should be slapped. My achievements are a blend of my work and my luck, my effort + unearned advantages, and all I can do is acknowledge both sides of the equation, and be grateful for the part I got for free.

In other news, cannot stop thinking about the 15 embryos in a dish, a dozen blocks from where I am sitting right now.

Maybe the reason I'm so engaged with this topic right now is because I am willing to trade not being praised if I get pregnant for not being blamed if I don't.

Two weeks from now it'll be over, one way or another. Two weeks from now I will be very grateful or very cranky.

Holy crap.

A Memo to the Internets

...apparently I've recovered enough to rant. This is inspired by a cluster of interactions, recent and not so recent, which bugged the hell out of me.

Dear Internet,

Following please find a list of reproductive scenarios. If these scenarios happen to you, you shouldn't be smug about it -- you should be grateful for it. To wit:

If you conceived on your first or second try;
If you conceived at home without any medical intervention;
If you conceived with minimal medical intervention;
If you had an uncomplicated pregnancy;
If you gave birth at full term;
If you desired and had an unmedicated birth;
If you desired and had a vaginal birth;
If you desired to and were able to breast feed.

Don't be proud of these things. Be grateful. The fact that you wanted {whatever} and got what you wanted is not a marker of your of moral superiority. It's a marker of having been lucky. There are plenty of people who wanted exactly what you wanted and still ended up with IVF/ICSI preterm drugged-to-the-gills Caesarean births. (please note: I also don't think you should judge yourself superior to those who didn't want those things in the first place... but that's really a separate rant. Don't worry, I'll get around to it.)

The proper reaction to luck is not to explain to everyone exactly what you did to get to {desired state}, and what {those who have not enjoyed the desired state} are doing wrong. It is to be grateful, and also to shut the fuck up.

For the record, although I joked in my tags about being a good little layer, I didn't do a damn thing that other people haven't done, people who end up with few or no embryos. I've been lucky, that's all (lucky and slightly polycystic), and darn tootin' I am grateful, and praying that my luck holds. If it does it'll be because I was... lucky. No other reason.