Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Monday, May 17, 2010

But maybe married sex is still better -- for us, anyway

Here's a rather bizarre sort of counter-argument to the prognostication that Michael Perry posted about IVF replacing sex.  The latest Yale Alumni magazine included an interview with Carey Goldberg, one of three authors of a book called "Three Wishes:  A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood."  It's described as a 'laugh-cry-and-cheer book."  This is how Goldberg describes the story:

The book begins when I turned 39 and was still single and decided to become a single mother. So I bought eight vials of donor sperm. But just as those vials arrived in my clinic’s freezer, I met the man who would become my husband and the father of my children. So I passed the sperm on to my friend Beth, who had just come out of a horrible divorce. But as soon as Beth got the sperm, she, too, met the man who would become her husband and the father of her child. So she passed the sperm on to our friend Pam, and the same thing happened! She met a man and had a baby. So it’s kind of a sisterhood of the traveling sperm.


The interview ends with this heart-warming colloquy between Goldberg and her daughter: 

My daughter Liliana is now eight. Recently I was playing the game of Life with her, and she reached the point on the board where your little car has to stop and you get married and put a spouse in. And my daughter said, “When I grow up I don’t think I’ll get married. I’ll just get some sperm.” And I found myself saying, “Well, that’s fine, but being married is really very nice too.”

So, I guess the "laugh and cheer" part of the book includes an affirmation of marriage and old-fashioned sex as still being the best way for this generation to have kids, even if either way would be OK for the next generation.  What about the "cry" part of the book?  May this:

But the book makes clear that having a baby this late is no picnic. I had one miscarriage. Both of my co-authors terminated pregnancies because they had chromosomal disorders.

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/05/but-maybe-married-sex-is-still-better-for-us-anyway.html

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