Judge: Egg Donor Cory Sause is Boy's Mother--and will get parenting rights

Cory Sause and son

An Oregon judge has ruled that an egg donor mother has the right to be part of her child's life, despite the efforts of the wealthy sperm-donor father who wants to cut her out of the picture. The ruling was based on the "contradictory" agreement that the egg-donor mother and the father signed prior to the birth of a son and emails and other evidence showing that the father intended to keep the mother in his son's life, changing his mind only after the boy was born. In her decision, Judge Amy Holmes in Portland said that she will meet with the parties to develop a parenting plan.

Jane

The case does not signal a breakthrough for all egg donors who after birth wish to participate in the resulting child's upbringing, for this case involved an agreement between two parties who were a couple at the time an egg was implanted in a surrogate, and the agreement signed was not cut-and-dried as is usual between parties who do not have a prior relationship. The child, a boy named Samuel, is now two.

Wall Street Journal decries loss of 'right' to be surrogate

Indian surrogates

The Wall Street Journal owned by billionaire media magnate Rupert Murdock rarely sheds tears for the poor and downtrodden.  It's come to bat, however, for Indian women threatened with losing income as surrogates if the India passes proposed legislation which criminalizes surrogacy for foreigners. A government-appointed body has already notified clinics they should stop offering such services to couples overseas. Since WSJ's readers are comprised largely of moneyed readers who are the ones to seek out surrogacy services, WSJ's crusading for wombs-for-hire is merely self-serving.

Thailand's booming business in surrogacy is an ethical swamp

Lorraine

A surrogate has twins. One of them has Down Syndrome. The biological parents only want the perfect child, and leave the Down Syndrome baby with the surrogate. Later it emerges, the father, David John Farnell, was convicted of 22 charges of child sex abuse in the 1990s in Australia. He met his current wife via a matchmaking agency. The child with Down Syndrome remains in Thailand with the surrogate mother, Farnell and his wife have the "healthy" twin. 

A Japanese businessman, multimillionaire Mitsutoki Shigeta, has had at least 15 children with surrogates whose births were weeks or months apart, and were all living in one house. The 24-year-old says his motives are pure; a large family is all he wants. He broke no law;

When a child of surrogacy asks: Who is my mommy?

Lorraine

"And Surrogacy Makes 3" reads the big headline in the New York Times yesterday under a picture that takes up half the page--two gay men and their adorable surrogate-gestated daughter, Sylvia, now 3. The story is all about the difficulty of having a child this way in New York because a 1992 state law bars surrogacy for money and equates it with baby-selling. 

But wait! Of course there is a way out. One of the fathers is Brad Holyman, state senator from Manhattan, and he is co-sponsor of a bill that would overturn the current law and make it legal to pay a surrogate in New York to carry a baby for you. The bill's sponsors argue that it makes no sense for New York, with both a large number of fertility clinics as well as gays seeking their services, not to be able to offer "commercial surrogacy" to those who want it, and can afford to pay for it. Why let places like California have all the benefits of hiring wombs?

Exploiting first mothers, then and now

(Jane, second row on the far right)

Babies come from mothers who don't want them was the shocking message of an adoption agency advertisement from the 1940's. The agency guaranteed prospective adoptive parents that babies would be matched to them not only in appearance, but also in intelligence. And unbelievably, prospective adoptive parents were also promised a "one year return policy" if the baby didn't fit into their family.

Ann Fessler's film, A Girl Like Her, includes this and other videos to present pictorially the ugly truth about adoption in the mid-twentieth century. As the videos of happy housewives dancing in their oh-so-modern kitchens and teens in full skirted strapless prom dresses switch to pictures of soldiers in Vietnam and war protesters, off screen first mothers tell their stories of loss without redemption.

Making babies, just to make ends meet

By Sarah Williamson for the New York Times

Making Babies, Just to Make Ends Meet is a sickening commentary on the American way of the future of birth, as well as the title of an essay in the New York Times Sunday Review section. The writer, Susan Straight, writes about her neighbor, a woman of 39, who had been pumping breast milk for the baby she carried and delivered for a wealthy couple in their late 50s who, with four teenage sons, wanted a girl. "They bought the milk too," is what she says about the blonde and older couple for whom she worked for as a baby carrier. 

A Modern Handmaid's Tale: Duping a woman to have your baby

Jane

In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood introduces us to a future world in which fertility rates are low and the babies are often defective ("unbabies") due to environmental decay. To increase the population, the government assigns fertile women ("handmaids") to wealthy couples. The handmaids are forced to have sex with husbands ("Commanders"). The resulting children are given to the "Commander's Wives."

The Handmaid's Tale was written in 1985; if it had been written a decade later, it might have dispensed with the sex part of reproduction, and told a story like that unfolding in Texas where Cindy Close claims she was duped into producing twins for Marvin McMurrey and his partner, Phong Nguyen.

The GOP stand on abortion is hollow at the center

Thinking cap

The inference that the Romney-Ryan camp has the moral high ground regarding abortion is baloney. Their tacked-on exceptions that make abortion allowable in cases of rape and incest belie their stance that preserving life itself is the crucial factor. One can include the exception to "save the life of the mother," in this analysis, but rape and incest? That doesn't fly.

If the purpose of opposing abortion is to "save the life of the unborn,"--how does the poor soul conceived through rape or incest, or both, count for less? He or she didn't do the rape, commit the incest. Innocent little sperm cells and an ova got together on a date with fate with nary a thought about whether it was a good "idea" or not.

Is it a 'Birth' Certificate or Certificate of Title?

Jane

Birth certificates have become legal instruments, reflecting ownership of children rather than parentage. In surrogacy-friendly California, birth certificates of children created in vitro with “donated” eggs and sperm, born to surrogates identify those who paid for the creation as the parents. In the Brave New World of “assisted reproduction” these children depend on the kindness of their legal parents and surrogacy clinic policies to learn whose DNA they carry.

More on Baby M from a psychiatrist who defended her mother, MaryBeth Whitehead

In the previous post about surrogacy and a current case in New Jersey in which Angelia Robinson agreed to bear a child (and had twin girls) with a egg purchased from a seller* and Sean Hollingsworth's sperm, her gay brother's partner, the judge in the case referred to the notorious Baby M case of the late Eighties. In that case, one of the first surrogacy births by legal contract, MaryBeth Whitehead was impregnated with the sperm of William Stern and gave birth to a daughter. MaryBeth immediately bonded with the girl, breast fed her for 123 days before she was forcibly taken from Whithead's mother's home in Florida by the police. At the time, Whitehead herself was hospitalized with a severe infection.
From Phyllis Chesler's book, Sacred Bond:

"...while the Sterns waited at the police station, detectives armed with an order for Melissa [the name of daughter given her by the Sterns] entered Catherine Messer's [Whitehead's mother] home. They allegedly knocked the grandmother down, took Sara [Whitehead's name for the girl] from her crib, and pushed away her older sister, Tuesday, who was screaming and hitting an officer on the leg with a hairbrush."

That was at the end of July, 1986. Whitehead was not permitted to see her until mid-September, when she was allowed to see her twice a week, for an hour each time. Yesterday I mentioned that not only did our acquaintance, Ms. Chesler, write in defense of Whitehead, but to our surprise while surfing the web we found that another friend, Michelle Harrison, had also written about the case. Through FaceBook, Michelle, a psychiatrist, who now runs an orphanage for girls in Kolkata, India and has two daughters herself, and I reconnected some months ago, and she sent us the following about the Baby M case, and how she got involved: 

I had followed the case in the papers, vaguely concerned.  I'd asked some feminist friends who had met her and they were not at that time supportive of her -- a clash of personality, class, religion...  Then one day driving to work I heard that she had threatened to kill the baby.  I was actually relieved.  If she was crazy, I didn't have to worry about her losing the child.  When I got to work I read the NY Times transcript of the phone conversation when she made the threat.  I thought, OMG, she has been set up!  She kept saying desperately to Bill [the biological father], that the baby was hers and Bill's--OUR baby--and he kept baiting her saying MY baby.  He was taunting her, and knew of course that he was recording her.  She kept saying they could share raising the baby, that he was the father and she wouldn't keep the baby from him.  Again he would repeat that the baby was HIS.  And then finally she said something to the effect, ' I bought her into this world.  I can .....' (I honestly don't remember the exact words but the threat was clear and for this she was condemned.)   As a psychiatrist, dealing with families, I knew how one person can drive another to say things in desperation.  He just kept calmly kept saying the baby was his, and she desperately wanted him to say OURS.  That's when I started making phone calls to try and get something started on her behalf.

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MARY BETH WHITEHEAD -- HARRISON 1 (3): 300 ...

by M HARRISON - 1987 - Cited by 21 - Related articles
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MARY BETH WHITEHEAD. MICHELLE HARRISON ...

I was able to obtain copies of all the "expert" reports, analyzed them, wrote the above paper.  There was nothing objective. She was called delusional for saying, 'My baby needs me and I need my baby.'  The reports were all the same as the experts had all examined the parties together.  A major criticism of MaryBeth was that she had kept the crib as this was a bad reminder for her other children and represented her not accepting the loss (all true but twisted in meaning).  My Cici [one of Michell's daughters] was only a couple of years older than Baby M, and we set up her old crib on the steps of the Hackensack Courthouse as part of our demonstration.

I wrote a chapter in a book about New Reproductive Technology in which I particularly praised MaryBeth's oldest child Tuesday.  When the detectives came to seize the baby, in Florida, she tried to fight them off with a hairbrush.  But the detectives raised the baby up towards the fan, and thus she and her grandmother let go -- to protect the baby, and the detectives took her away.  She was a nursing baby, literally torn from the arms of her family.  It was months before they were reunited, for short supervised visits.  But the baby, each time, would snuggle into her mother's arms and go to sleep. The baby had tried to nurse, but MaryBeth was forbidden to nurse her.

As I write this, more than twenty years later, sitting at my computer in an Indian orphanage, surrounded by children I love, I'm reminded of the opening line of the first medical paper published in the US about surrogate motherhood. Dr. Phillip Parker in New England Journal of Medicine wrote that there was a "shortage of white babie" and larger demand.  I can't find the paper online and my copies are in the US so I don't have the exact quote -- but this was the rationale for surrogate motherhood, and is an underlying rationale for much of the new reproductive technology. 

I once again thank Lorraine for keeping these memories alive for all of us -- giving meaning to the fights we have made, win or lose, but always there as foundations for tomorrow's work.

--------------

Dr. Michelle Harrison describes herself as a mother, writer, physician, psychiatrist, artist, currently living in an orphanage she established for 12 orphan girls in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India. Her connection to Kolkata is through her younger daughter who was two months old when she adopted her from a Calcutta orphanage. Dr. Harrison also has a "stomach baby" (wonderful term, says Dr. Harrison, used in India) born in 1972.  In 2006 she established an NGO, Childlife Preserve: Shishur Sevay.  Four of the girls have severe disabilities. All the girls are being educated in a local government school as well as at Shishur Sevay, which is a non-institutional model for inclusive care of disabled and abled children living together. Shishur Sevay, says Dr. Harrison, is a place of joy. Michelle is "Mummy" to them all. This is a link to her blog:

www.travelingcloud.typepad.com/shishur_sevay/

_________________

Michelle's post reminds me once again how little respect birth/first mothers get, particularly from the adopting middle and upper classes. If they can denigrate us, demean us, it must make it easier for them to take our children, and think they are doing A Good Thing. Class distinction that they perceive, or that is real, is one reason the feminists by and large have never wholeheartedly embraced our cause--while they did of working class women in regards to wages and sexual harassment. They don't see the loss of our children through adoption as a feminist issue because too many of them want to adopt themselves--and they fall back on--Hey, You signed the surrender paper.

This class business is one of the many reasons that I urge first/birth mothers to come out of the closet. While we may have been down on our luck, or badgered and forced by our parents into submission when we relinquished our children, today many of us lead successful middle-class lives. And we need to tell the world that WE DID NOT FORGET. We think about the children we surrendered to adoption every day. Most of us hope to meet them one day, and hope they search for us.

I long for the day we find a first/birth mother in some state legislature and she fights for giving adopted people their original birth certificates--and birth mothers the right to find out their child's new name!

________________________________________
In one of those twists of fate that connect people, Michelle was a pioneer in identifying and treating severe premenstrual syndrome, which I have written about in connection with my daughter, as she killed herself when she was in the throes of the worst of it. I too had the same problem, but found amazing relief with large doses of the hormone progesterone, and wrote about it for several magazines twenty years ago, often quoting Dr. Harrison. Progesterone is inexpensive, it's not hard to compound synthetically from soy, but because Big Pharma can not patent it, the large-scale drug tests that would bring it to the medical community's attention will not be done. Yet it is not hard to obtain.

I can only say that progesterone helped my life, and my sanity, as it has the other women with the same problem I have recommended trying this to. Several several times I urged my daughter to try it--not just the creams that you can buy over the counter, but a larger dose, available by prescription, taken only when one is premenstrual--but she resisted, saying that she already took so many drugs, for her epilepsy, for her depression. I write about all this here again in case anyone reading has the same monthly problem in the hope of getting just one more woman relief. In my own case, progesterone saved not only my marriage, but quite possibly my life. --lorraine
___________________________
*I refrain from using the word "donor" as the surrogacy purveyors do, as that implies a gift, but as far as we can tell, the egg was purchased from a businesswoman who sold her eggs.

Surrogate Mother Wins Right to Sue for Custody; Police Chief Sentenced for Stealing Surrogate Items

In the world of convoluted conception, complications are setting in like labor pains--they are not going away anytime soon. On the heels of yesterday's post about a biological mother going underground with her daughter rather than sharing the girl as court ordered with her former gay partner and legal parent, today there's another surrogacy custody fight heading for the courts in the spring. 

A New Jersey judge has ruled that a surrogate mother who bore twin girls not conceived with her ova is the legal mother of the children and has the right to seek primary custody of them at trial in the spring. The woman, Angelia G. Robinson of Jersey City, agreed to bear the children for her brother, Donald Robinson Hollingsworth, and his male spouse, Sean Hollingsworth, using Sean's--not her brother's--sperm. After the girls were born in October, 2006 they went to live with the men, but within six months, in March 2007, Robinson sought custody, alleging that she had been coerced into the arrangement. Since then she has been taking care of the girls three days a week.

Judge Francis B. Schultz of Superior Court relied heavily on precedent established by the New Jersey Superior Court in the infamous 1987-88 case of  Baby M, in which a surrogate mother, Mary Beth Whitehead, carried her own genetic child for another couple, Elizabeth and William Stern, after being artificially inseminated with Stern's sperm. After she gave birth Whitehead breast-fed the baby and decided she could not give her up. In the end, in a legally complicated and convoluted decision, the Sterns were granted custody, but the court ruled that Whitehead's maternal rights could not be terminated against her will, that surrogacy contracts were against public policy. Whitehead was eventually able to win visitation rights, and though I can't find them on the net today, I remember reading at least one story several years later when the girl was visiting Whitehead and her two half-siblings at her home.

At the time, both the adoption and adoption-reform community were deeply involved in the ongoing saga that generated nearly as many stories in the media as a certain famous golfer with a predilection for promiscuity did recently. Though adoption-reform community came down heavily in favor of giving Whitehead custody of her daughter, most of the rest of the media titled toward the Sterns. Working-class Whitehead was portrayed as a somewhat pathetic creature--she was unstable because she changed her mind about giving up her daughter--and the expert testimony at trial was heavily weighted in favor of the upstanding middle class couple, the Sterns. For having agreed to be a surrogate in the first place, for not being of the solid middle class background of the Sterns (Elizabeth (Betsy) Stern was a doctor), for having the temerity to change her mind about giving up her baby, Whitehead was pilloried in the press. However, there were exceptions.

We note that one of our friends, Michelle Harrison, now an adoptive mother to many in India--not from, but IN India--wrote in Perspectives that the testimony of experts was heavily "imbued with prevailing middle-class beliefs about good mothers and good parenting." Which of course would exclude many first/birth mothers--then, and today--from being considered suitable mothers. The New York Times ran an editorial, "There Is Nothing Surrogate about the Pain," that condemned the trial as biased against both women and the working class and called for joint custody. Feminists, who have largely looked away from the plight of first/birth mothers, spoke out for Whitehead. Adoption-reform pioneer Florence Fisher did also.

Yet the prevailing wind was with the Sterns. Even most women, without the perspective of having lost a child to adoption, or in a custody fight, sided with the couple. They simply did not like lower-class Mary Beth. Feminist thinker and author Phyllis Chesler took up Whitehead's cause and wrote in Sacred Bond, The Legacy of Baby M.: "Women who have never been allowed to talk back eventually identify with the aggressor and have no pity for a victim who reminds them of themselves." To which we add: Amen.

It is worth noting here that Mrs. Stern was not infertile but had multiple sclerosis, and was concerned about the possible physical implications of pregnancy. A colleague testified that his wife, with the same condition, had temporary paralysis during pregnancy. Incidentally, the contract between Whitehead and the Sterns is available on line. She was to be paid $10,000 for a live infant. It's really kinda awful to read, and certainly considers the baby as property.

While the Baby M case did uphold the surrogacy contract, the judgment was not laudatory about the arrangement, and the judge in the current case in New Jersey (what is it about New Jersey, is it something in the water?) quoted this in the current decision:

"The surrogacy contract," the Baby M court found, "is based on principles that are directly contrary to the objectives of our laws. It guarantees the separation of a child from its mother; it looks to adoption regardless of suitability; it totally ignores the child; it takes the child from the mother regardless of her wishes and maternal fitness."

Citing that passage, Judge Schultz wrote, "Would it really make any difference if the word 'gestational' was substituted for the word 'surrogacy' in the above quotation? I think not."

All this reminds us once again why we do not like surrogacy pregnancies--with the woman's own eggs, or with another woman's eggs. No matter how you deconstruct the feelings involved, surrogacy contracts create babies on demand, often babies for profit. We ask, how different is the situation of a surrogate mother different from a first/birth mother who agrees to sign--or does sign--papers relinquishing her child but changes her mind hours, days, weeks later? Does the fact that the birth began with a surrogacy contract make the experience different?

We think not. Having given up a child of our own egg, we do think there may be an emotional difference between a purely gestational surrogate mother and a genetic mother, but we do not have the answers today, and nor are we even sure of our feelings.
_______________
Now for a change of pace as surrogacy madness continues: In the "how-did-I-miss-this?" category comes the sentencing of an Ohio police chief, Barry D. Carpenter, for breaking into the home of the surrogate mother for Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick. Carpenter, former chief of police of Martin's Ferry, and two other men, including another police chief from a neighboring town, Chad M. Dojack of Bridgeport, broke into the home of the woman and stole items they intended to sell to tabloid newspapers. :) Yes, that is me being amused.

Carpenter, who did the crime while on duty (you gotta admit, that took some chutzpah) was sentenced to 32 months, but the promise of early release is held out, Judge John Solovan of Blemont County Court, said to Carpenter if  "you accept responsibility and account for your actions and your crimes." Dojack's case is set for January. Charges against Dojack's father-in-law, who is the son of Bridgeport's mayor, who had appointed Dojack chief (ah, the beauty of small towns) were dropped. Parker and Broderick have twins. And Parker kept her Size Zero figure.

Happy New Year everyone!  I am trying to take a break from the blog and get to some other writing work, but the news just keeps on rolling along. --lorraine

Can Feminists Adopt and Still Be Feminists?

Can a feminist adopt in good conscience?

No, says one Korean adoptee. Read what Kathie Leo has to say about that in the Minnesota Women's Press.

While we talked about international adoption lately, and then we've had the surrogacy and embryo debate, we skirted around the issue of what makes these issues so distasteful: the caste system inherent in all such transfers of human commodity. Because that's what babies are in our current milieu: a commodity, just like electric shavers and cheap toys. It's cash that makes the export of infant human flesh such a thriving business.

Is France sending us their excess babies? NO. Great Britain? NO. The babies are coming from Third World, undeveloped countries where the women are too poor to take care of them--and thus wealthy white women swoop in and buy them. Yes, I use that word buy because cash is what makes the transfer of babies from one country to another possible. In China, the one-child-per-couple policy led to the massive baby-export business, so lucrative that today China has a problem with baby and child kidnapping. HBO recently aired a documentary about it, China's Stolen Children.

Where are the baby farms where surrogate mothers are willing to take on the job of bearing children for wealthy foreigners? India, a country where great poverty exists side-by-side with great wealth. Once some enterprising capitalist gets wind of this, more poor countries will be setting up baby-gestation farms.

And the same monetary principles, generally speaking, work in adoption. It is not wealthy girls and young women who by and large are offering babies to adopt; they are having abortions or keeping their children. It's girls and young women and mothers in poor families who can not keep them who say, Here, take mine, I can not afford to keep her. The humane thing to do would be to make it possible for the poor woman to keep the child. A few years ago, the sister of a friend adopted a child from an intact, but poor, family in Rhode Island. What is that if not baby-selling? Would it not have been more humane to simply help support that family?

This caste system is why we find surrogacy and egg donation for money repugnant. Why adoptions from Third World countries--or China--are so prone to abuses. I have, among my acquaintances, a far-left feminist law professor. But where did she adopt?

Guatemala.

Did she not see the apparent dichotomy in this act? Obviously not. Elizabeth Bartholet, a feminist law professor at Harvard, imported two boys from Peru. She showed up to be on the television when the Anna/Jessica transfer the wicked DeBoers (now divorced) back to her natural parents, the Schmidts (ah, also divorced) was going on. She and I had a shouting match on the McNeal-Lerher Report that day. The jacket to her book (Family Bonds), says that she "produced" one child (drum roll, please) then "endured her own struggle with infertility" for ten years before she flew to Peru to adopt, some eighteen years after her first child was born. Interestingly enough, her age--when she was "struggling" with infertility aka perimenopause--is not mentioned there. The timing had to be up to and into her forties. But because you want to have children beyond the reasonable time frame of your fertility and your body refuses does not make your lack of fertility a disease. It is, dear ladies, a reality of aging!

Yet the snarky Ms. Bartholet--who told me the research showing that adoptees were prone to more mental health problems than the norm was "garbage,"--saw nothing anti-feminist is taking boys from their poor country to give them a "better life."

For that is what is stated or implied in all adoption stories: that life that the adoptive family offers is better than the original one. Here's how Kathie Leo put it:

The story further implies certain suppositions about what "a better life" means. In this scenario, "better" clearly means American, but it also suggests wealthier, Caucasian, and most important, not with my birthmother. This notion of "a better life" has permeated adoption narratives since the practice began, often used as justification for its existence.

Amen. Ms. Leo's piece has more to say. It's worth reading. As for me, I tried for years to get a piece in Ms. magazine about birth mothers with the above theme. No luck. The feminists who were putting out the magazine had the mindset of Ms. Bartholet and friends. No--wait, they were Ms. Bartholet's friends.--lorraine

PS: Tomorrow we'll hear from Jane.

So What Do You Think of Surrogate Mothers?

Well, back from Manhattan today where I met my new agent for the first time. Yes, I am working on a memoir about my quarter-century relationship with my daughter. Heard about dismal publishing milieu today. Editors will be fired, some companies not even looking at new manuscripts. (Sounds like the auto industry, no?) Check. How this can't be just "another birth-mother memoir." Well, okay, I'll do my best. How I can't come across as still a victim...at that point, the years of frustrations from being victimized by the closed records system back in 1966 pinged inside and tears welled up...I felt like Hillary Clinton when she became glassy-eyed after being asked, "How do you get up and do it every day?" When I told the agent I'd never cried on television, she said, "Well, that isn't always bad...."

So all I can do is the best that I can do.

Though I had no idea before I submitted my partial manuscript to her, she was the agent who sold the best book on being adopted: Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self by Brodzinsky (adoptive father) Schechter (married to an adoptee) and Martanz Henig (good writer who put it all together). Meanwhile, let's get to Sunday's (11/30/08) New York Times Magazine piece: Her Body, My Baby. Adventures of a rich girl who tried to have babies at age 34 and up and after eleven attempts with IVF and four failed pregnancies, she gave up and for $25,000 hired a womb from a nice 43-year-old woman in Pennsylvania who needed the money to help put her kids through college...

In the end I didn't actually hate the writer (Alex Kuczynski) and mom-with-the-perfect-body (though many if not most of the hundreds of people who commented on the New York Times website did). Eleven IVF cycles is a hell of a lot, and from what I've read, they are not pleasant, the miscarriages must have been devastating, and so I have some sympathy for this woman. How can you not?

Almost Baked
Cathy Hilling at home in Harleysville, Pa.
Gillian Laub for The New York Times

But what is galling is how the statistics for infertility were treated in the piece, that is, as if infertility was an illness--not a normal reality of advancing age. I'm 66--and pretty sure I'm infertile. Should I be counted in this statistic? Here's the letter I fired off to the Times magazine Monday.

To the Editor:

While the writer of Her Body, My Baby (November 30), Alex Kuczynski, notes that infertility affects 7.3 million people in the United States, this is an erroneous figure, for it equates infertility among older women as abnormal, as if they all had the flu. There is no difference today between fertility rates of the past and today--what is different is the age at which women and men try to conceive. According to the Mayo Clinic, a woman's fertility peaks between the ages of 20 and 24, begins slowly declining until the early 30s, after which fertility declines quite rapidly. At age 30 to 35, fertility is 15 to 20 percent below maximum. From age 35 to 39, the decrease is 25 to 50 percent. From 40 to 45, the decrease is 50 to 95 percent. The writer of the piece did not try to conceive until she was, at best, 34. Savvy marketing of fertility services often makes no mention of these facts, and many men and women today are lulled into believing that technology can easily help them get pregnant when they are ready.

However, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, age affects the success rates of infertility treatments as well as your natural ability to get pregnant. According to a 2003 booklet put out by the organization, a healthy 30-year-old woman has about a 20 percent chance per month to get pregnant. By age 40, however, her chance is only about 5 percent per month. In many cases, these percentages are true for natural conception as well as conception assisted reproductive technology.

Although Ms. Kuczynski, best known for her exhaustive research into numerous anti-aging treatments and surgeries, treats the realtionship with the surrogate mother candidly, pieces such as this one further encourage the wait-too-long mentality and then, the somewhat yukky trade in rent-a-womb. Lorraine Dusky

Let me know what you think about surrogate mothers--I really am interested how this plays with adoptees and other birth mothers. As the piece in the Times makes clear, its a lot less complicated emotionally (quel surprise!) when the egg isn't the surrogate's. But it still makes me queasy. I have less trouble with a relative having the baby since there is usually no exchange of filthy lucre. I saw one case where a mother did it for her daughter.

Gotta go--having my annual visit to the gynecologist in an hour. Delightful. I'm sure I put on a couple of pounds since the last weigh-in. Too much whipped cream on my pie.
--lorraine

PS: Yes, Kippa, Mairaine is right about which mothers were actually visiting with their children, and who was in touch only through communication at a distance, i.e., phone call, email, a written note. (See previous post and comments.) Although my daughter Jane periodically cut off communication for some reason or another, we basically had a relationship for a quarter of a century. At the end, it was close and great, but I couldn't save her from her demons. Next week it will be a year since she committed suicide, and though it's on my mind, I'm certainly not marking the day in any way special. That would just exacerbate what is already a river of grief.