It's a sign of the late-August dog days, I guess, that the big news is a box-office flop: the Jennifer Aniston artificial-insemination vehicle The Switch.
Do I mean that this movie is a vehicle for the glisteny Jennifer Aniston, who has never quite moved beyond either "that girl that played on Friends," or that girl who, every single week of the world, on the covers of every single tabloid in the grocery-store checkout line, is just about to steal Brad Pitt back from the chick with the sultry lips? Or do I mean that it's a vehicle for the idea of artificial insemination, a signal that if we think there's anything wrong with that, we're the ones who are out of the mainstream?
I'm really not sure.
Over at the Washington Post, Danielle Bean is talking about it, taking on the movie's premise with regard to its assumptions about family. The movie assumes, in Aniston's words, that
it isn't necessarily the traditional mother, father, two children and a dog named Spot . . . Love is love and family is what is around you and who is in your immediate sphere. That is what I love about this movie. It is saying it is not the traditional sort of stereotype of what we have been taught as a society of what family is.
Bean takes issue, rightly, with the notion of having a child because you want to have a child, but do not necessarily want, or have convinced yourself that you don't need, a family. If you don't want or need a family, at least in any traditional sense, then neither does your child; so apparently goes a thought process which, to judge from most of the comments appended to Bean's article, is gaining cultural ascendancy about as fast as the sun rises in the morning. Or to put it another way, it would seem that what Bean stands for -- a family with a mother and a father, a family which accepts children as gifts rather than making them as do-it-yourself home-improvement projects -- is the sinking of the sun behind a stand of black mountains. At least, the cultural clock points to that, though of course we've all known clocks to be wrong.
Meanwhile, at First Things, Mary Rose Somarriba takes up the question of why, exactly, the artificial construction of a child is a joke with any number of unfunny punchlines.
What’s sad is that some real, deep aspects of the human experience—such as the realization of one’s aging, the desire for love and family, and the sorrow of lost time—are covered up with chipper confidence that none of these things matter anymore. Age doesn’t matter. Time is never lost.Again, the comments are illuminating. This being First Things and not the WaPo, most readers are on board with Somarriba's objections to the movie's attempts to jokify, rather than ponder, a set of imponderables about the value of human life and what causes that life to be valuable. Still, there are the people who don't get it. A reader named BillyG, for example, says he "knows" some children born via reproductive technology, and they're all fine. One of them even just went to college. So, wow. Ends, meet means. Shake hands. Make happy happy. The end.
Love and commitment aren’t necessary; in fact, they’re not even worth seeking. You can start a family all on your own. It’s a Do-It-Yourself Family! The biological bond required to conceive a child—a male’s sperm and a female’s egg—is all you need; you don’t need the metaphysical and the personal bond with another to make a family.
Surely they value love and commitment; they want love and commitment to be an essential part of their relationship with their children, don’t they? Nobody doubts it. But how does one expect these to translate into relationships with their kids if the parent doesn’t value love and commitment in their own lives to start with? It’s one of those questions that isn’t asked and is laughed off.
Only of course it's not that simple. Now, regarding children born of reproductive technology -- your AI babies, your IVF babies -- I don't think that any reasonable person would suggest that these people should not have been born. That's where the argument always goes, right? You don't like IVF? Well, meet my lovely daughter and tell her to her face she shouldn't exist.
But that is where the argument shouldn't go, because it's not the point at all. The point is not that a person's origins make him bad, but that the fact of his goodness does not make his mode of origin right, if it isn't.
Consider this: let's say that I have a child conceived out of wedlock. Let's say that this child is the consequence of my affair with a married man.
Let's say, also, that she is a bright, beautiful, talented child, the joy of my life. Let's say, though it should be so obvious that we shouldn't have to say it, that God loves her, too.
So, how she got here doesn't matter, right? The point is that she is here.
Well, yes and no. Yes, she's here (hypothetically, at any rate), and this is an objective good. But what is also objectively true is that she got here by means which were frankly destructive.
If I have slept with a married man, I have effected the violation of that man's marriage vows and the betrayal of his wife and existing children. With him, I have brought into being a child who -- despite the objective and utter goodness of her life -- stands as a marker to half her family of her father's betrayal. Perhaps one of her grandmothers refuses to acknowledge her, and her half-siblings are not allowed to know of her existence. Maybe she doesn't know about them, either, but I do. And when she wants to know where her father is, I have to say . . . something.
Or maybe her father's with us. Let's say he ditched the first wife and kids and married me. Fine, my kid has a dad at home with her, but then the kids from the first marriage don't. So she knows he has this other family, and the half-siblings maybe spend weekends with us, or the summer, and eventually my kid is old enough to do math, and to work out the months between our wedding and her birth, and to put together a picture of her father's behavior to the women in his life which is less than heroic, let's say.
I would never, never (hypothetically) wish this child's life unlived. But we can't affirm the goodness of it without also asking hard questions. For instance, given all this blessing business, does it automatically follow that the affair which gave this child life was not a grave error? Does my child's life undo the damage wrought by infidelity? Does it un-hurt the hurt, does it un-betray the betrayal? Does it leave the child in question unscathed by those things? Does it leave me with answers I can feel good about giving her, when the inevitable questions come up?
Tell story of your life: it ought to be easy. And it ought not to be littered with cast-off people.
If a child is here, the child has a right to life; it is right that the child has life. None of that, however, makes adultery any more right, or more desirable as a cultural norm. None of this makes it any more true that, hey, your way of building a family is . . . just your way of building a family.
It's not true. And no laugh track will make it so. Da. Dum. Ching.
