Give Me Your Baby!

The pregnant man
Originally uploaded by oatmeal2000

In the course of two consecutive days, I have heard similar stories about babies. Not the ones about how cute they are or how they smell so good, but about how people don’t want them. My boyfriend and I are going to get married this coming summer and soon after that we hope to start a family. That is an understatement. We are verging on desperate to start a family. There is just one small catch – we are both men.

Now these stories I heard, one was a woman in another country who was desperately seeking the morning after pill, currently not available where she lives, to get rid of an early pregnancy, and the other was a young woman who simply got pregnant when she was not expecting to, and mutually made the decision with her boyfriend to terminate. Both these women are well within their rights to do what they will. After all, as one of them pointed out, “it is my body” My question for them, though, is what about MY body?

Due to a simple chromosome, my body is not able to create life, and there is nothing I can ever do about it. My only hope for a baby is to get one from someone who’s chromosome pattern does allow them to have a child. Whether we adopt it, or buy it, or whatever, we must rely on people other then ourselves. We don’t get to make the choices that some women do. Instead, we are at the mercy of these women and their decisions.

What I am struggling with right now is how do I get my liberal mind, that says to these women, “You have every right to do what you want with your body,” to reconcile with my heart, which is crying “I would give anything in the world for a child – how can you be so selfish as to throw away this gift!” I just can’t help but thinking, what if we could take your baby that you don’t want? Give me your baby!

I really don’t think there is a way around my current conundrum. Sometimes your heart and your mind will have to agree to disagree. I am still sad, though, and probably will remain so, thinking about all those women to whom a baby is an inconvenience and a mistake, and then thinking about all those other people out there who are desperate for a child that they can’t physically produce. Everyone has their own reasons for doing that they do and wanting what they want, and one of the beauties of humanity, I guess, is the complexity of these reasons.

Needless to say, my husband to be – who I love more than anything, and who will one day be the greatest daddy – will join me in putting our names on a list, on many lists that will hopefully bring us the joy we desire. And maybe, at the same time, there will be a woman out there who will decide, around the same time, that instead of an inconvenience growing inside of her, that she instead carries the greatest gift she could ever hope to give to another person.