Surrogacy, Biology, Destiny: A Brave -- but Complicated -- New World

Not long after my baby was born, my partner and I ventured out to Target to pick up some essentials. I was sitting on a low shelf in the infant and toddler section, feeding the baby while I watched a beautiful couple -- the wife about a decade or so older than me, the husband probably 20 years on -- run from aisle to aisle picking up the basics of infant care (a car seat, onesies, little beanie hats). I began forming a story for them in my head: She was his second wife, I decided, and they were shopping for his grandson.

I was right on the first count, but not the second: they were shopping for their own son, a boy they were about to meet. They were adopting a child in D.C. I began to cry when I heard their story; so powerful it was to me the idea of meeting your child for the first time.

But then the birth mother backed out.

Five days after the baby was theirs, suddenly he was no longer their son. (We four stayed in touch by e-mail.) Eventually, after much pain, there was a happy ending: A young woman in California, a teen, pregnant and looking for a good home for her soon-to-be-born child, was matched with them. They now have a year-old daughter.

Would it have been easier if they had used a surrogate? More expensive, for sure, but more locked down? Set up in advance? No messy links to a biological mom?

To be honest, I don't know their back story. Did they try to have a child of their own before adopting? I didn't ask. But whatever that story was, it ended (happily) with adoption.

I thought back to this couple, and about breeding in general, after reading Lizzie Skurnick's brilliant piece on the HBO documentary "GoogleBaby," about the global reach, murky ethics and emerging big business of surrogacy, a subject that the New York Times picked up on a few years ago. Women in India, where laws are relatively liberal and labor is relatively cheap, are becoming rented wombs for couples in the West with some means and the desire -- or desperation -- to create children. (The Christian Science Monitor ran a piece a few years before the Times about childless couples with viable eggs and sperm, but on the hunt for a good working uterus).

For some, baby-making is all but impossible. The Israelis who started the surrogacy company profiled in "GoogleBaby" were doing it as much out of altruism as for the dinero -- this was a means of having a child. For some couples, surrogacy, or egg donation, or some other modern means to reproduction is the best route to biological kids. That includes gay men -- a subject CNN's Soledad O'Brien tackles Thursday with "Gary and Tony Have a Baby," an "In America" special on a gay couple who surmount tremendous obstacles (and tremendous financial hurdles) in the quest for parenthood. In it we meet "Holly," the pretty, 20-something egg donor (a good age for eggs) whose "employer doesn't want her to use her last name" because she's donating eggs to a gay couple. (For God's sake, who does she work for??)

But it's not just gay men who lack an in-house womb. There are thousands of couples, globally and here in America, who search for means to upend the devastation of infertility. These are couples who have battled childlessness born of the unexpected (cancer), the regretful (delaying child-bearing for work) and the unplannable (the search for the right partner). Certainly, there are many for whom surrogacy and/or egg donation have brought great joy after years of sadness.

But at the same time, there is some cost, socially. Not everyone can afford this joy. Not everyone can stomach the heartache it takes to manipulate biology, the years of failed infertility treatments, the search for a surrogate or egg or both. Have we reached an age where, with the right amount of money, we've surmounted all inabilities to reproduce? To some degree yes, to some degree no. Nothing is without cost.

Some years ago, I met a producer for CNN who asked me if I had kids. I laughed. I was 29 at the time and not at all interested in starting a family. Freeze your eggs! she urged, noting that she was deliriously happy with her two adopted kids, but that they had come after a decade of infertility treatments. In the end I didn't freeze, but I did write a long piece for New York Magazine on the subject, including the hunt to thwart the vagaries and limits of biology for women who want children who are biologically their own.

At every turn, the fertility doctors I spoke to, as excited as they were about the new technology, whispered to me: You already have a partner. What are you waiting for? Don't become one of our patients. I found it terrifying.

To this day I get e-mails a few times a month from Extend Fertility, one of the egg-freezing and storage companies. They organize mixers in Manhattan attended by women in finance and law and other professions that encourage women to delay delay delay. Extend promotes the handful of babies born after freezing eggs in cheerful e-mail newsletters. The problem with freezing an egg -- versus an embryo -- is that an egg is mostly water. Freeze them without great care and they crack. Embryos are an easier bet, if ethically gray. Eggs, on the other hand, aren't anyone's future zygote without the sperm.

And some women don't have someone at the ready to make embryos with, if they're facing years in which they can't have a child because of work or disease. One woman I met had frozen embryos before cancer treatment. But then she and the guy broke up. He married another woman. Now their embryos are in limbo, forever. She wanted to freeze eggs in the event another guy didn't come along soon enough. The idea was: stop time. Bring in the youngest eggs you've got so that in your 40s you might have the fertility of your 30s or (better yet) late 20s.

So, theoretically at least, egg freezing offers women the option, or so marketers say, to delay the biological clock until a time that is better for kids. The only problem is that harvesting them takes several rounds of aggressive hormones and painful extractions. The same method, it might be noted, that egg donors go through. That's why it's so much more expensive to buy an egg than to purchase sperm.

I worry, also, what the effect of those hormones will be down the line. All in all, whatever the outcome, the process is unequivocally much tougher on women's bodies and souls than 10 minutes in the bathroom with a smutty mag.