by Mark Greif
On the other hand, babies’ classic status as liabilities for the poor (and public funds/the public treasury/public welfare/public weal), especially in the eyes of many of the rich, has been complicated recently by the increasingly radicalized politics of abortion. Babies have long stood as the prime resource-devouring symbol of the ill-controlled profligacy of the irresponsible lower classes. (Remember the song they sing at the party in The Great Gatsby, “Ain’t We Got Fun,” with its rewritten verse: “One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer / The rich get richer and the poor get—children.”) Nowadays, children are a liability even for the middle classes, because, had too early, they keep you from your now necessary bachelor’s and graduate degrees and, in an “information economy,” stunt your income growth.
Yet to choose to have a baby rather than abort is suddenly to be a certain kind of moral hero, at least for antiabortionists and the increasingly wide swath of popular media they pull in their train. The old Malthusian politics of elites (like that of George H. W. Bush, once a staunch advocate of international family planning) has been born again (like his son W.) in a politics of conservative Christian fecundity. The endless focus on the holy fetus itself, the saved (and salvational) baby who can be rescued from nonexistence—wholly unmindful of its parents’ resources, the family into which it will be born, and its own likely life—has made babies qua babies additionally valuable and interesting, even when born to teenagers and the poor.
Despite extensive neoliberal deregulation of other markets since 1980, under US law it is still prohibited to sell spare babies. And domestic Caucasian babies remain a scarce and valuable commodity for “white” people of all political persuasions who are infertile, gay, or simply having trouble conceiving because of delayed efforts at childbearing, following education and a career. The major options for those with money to spend include finding legal ways to adopt a child from a poorer country, getting lucky or getting ahead in a local adoption queue, paying a surrogate to gestate an embryo you provide (either your own, or gametes purchased half or in toto), or submitting to IVF or intrauterine insemination (IUI) with your own scientifically monitored womb. Most of these endeavors cost quite a bit. Even getting a baby of your own through IVF can cost a ton, and even if you’re using your own eggs, sperm, and womb. Though competitively advertised at ten thousand to fifteen thousand dollars per trial, four trials before success is considered normal; any particular case may require more.
In the affluent West today, babies are cheap when you don’t want them, expensive when you do. This paradox of timing, unnamed, seems to have become an element indigenous to the thinking of the educated professional classes. Well beyond that stratum, however, baby having has been transformed by the recent upward redistribution of America’s wealth and advances in biomedicine from being something biologically prohibitive, after a certain age, to something economized. I don’t mean simply that a person hoping to become rich has to scrimp on babies, not having too many. Rather, Americans have been brought into a system in which they make trade-offs among earning power, individual life chances, present fertility, biomedicine, and cash, in a way that mirrors “investment” thinking, whether they are rich or poor.
For educated classes, the relative triumph of IVF, surrogacy, and adoption from overseas countries with poorer populations, providing children to affluent straight and gay couples, has now woven some consumer reassurance into the old scary narrative—but also a kind of lottery mentality. You might still get everything you want. Your chances improve, though, the more tickets you can afford to buy, and there is no coherent feminist or social-minded vision here of what you should want—or why you deserve to get it—to backstop the somewhat guilty scramble to become a parent.
The animus of the antiabortion conservative right sometimes seems, subtextually, in part a revenge on these same “new class” professional elites who are too well contracepted, and too well planned and self-controlled, to regularly need abortions themselves. And of course these antiabortion campaigns are funded and publicized by rich political and economic elites on the right. Yet cast through the prism of religion they are often embraced and undertaken by the right-wing poor. This contributes the stage-managed quality of such populism, using poorer pregnant women as subjects of a proxy war (strategized largely, of course, by men). The right-wing revenge still has to consist, though, in inducing the young and poor, whenever possible, to bring to term babies who may require state aid to eat and be housed—services that in its other efforts the same right makes haste to cut. A paradoxical effect: By promoting the fertility of the poor, the right suggests that it, and not the proabortion left, is the true ally of the poor. Just don’t expect a free lunch, kiddo, once you’re here.
The confidence of the liberal defense of abortion, meanwhile, has sometimes seemed, of late, to be weakened by the rhetoric of late babies—of “our” collective entitlement to, and difficulty in having, babies. I don’t know how to confirm or disconfirm this, and I’m hesitant to suggest it; so call it a personal fear, or feeling, about a discourse in which I, in my mid-thirties, am increasingly a participant, with biomedical hopes on which I will likely rely as I age. If you’re a “successful” woman or man who needed but didn’t necessarily even use abortion rights in your early twenties, can you muster the same passion for their defense when you’re desperately trying to conceive at forty?
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What I see in popular culture is further paradox. Beginning in 2005, the MTV documentary division scored a hit with an anodyne reality series called My Super Sweet 16. An ultrarich teen plans a lavish party for her sixteenth birthday. By the end of the episode, the child will usually have cried because Daddy has paid for the totally wrong star entertainer (Usher rather than Ludacris, or vice versa), or she will have been made to dress up in a humiliating outfit, or some rank employee has scheduled the limousine too late. Five workingmen’s salaries will have been thrown away on sequins, and multiple party planners will have shouted into two-way radios. All is forgiven with the presentation of a Mercedes, though the sixteen-year-old is as yet too young to drive alone in many states. In the curious way of MTV documentary, the producers play this straight. You don’t know whether to envy or revile the protagonists. It is simply another ambiguous artifact of the twenty-first-century culture of excess.
Then, last year, MTV added a series called 16 and Pregnant. What was not clear until you had watched a few episodes was that this was an exact counterpart to My Super Sweet 16. The girls were in much different circumstances, to be sure. They had chosen to carry their accidental pregnancies to term. They lived, and were being filmed, in other parts of the country than the coasts, where rich teens were filmed. The congruence was that the baby seemed, in its way, as much a promise of luxury for the girls, at the start of each episode, as had the expensive fête and German automotive marvel for their richer brethren. This is what these girls in Iowa, Michigan, and Tennessee were able to have, despite their parents’ pleas that they think again. The ritual of telling the kids at school matched the invitation giving (Who should I tell I’m pregnant? Who should I not tell? How is it that I told only ten people and now everybody knows? Am I off the cheer team? Will they throw me a party?); visits with obstetricians come off exactly the same as those with party planners; then comes the Big Day. The two shows’ rhetoric and even narrative structure were the same. At sixteen, pregnancy entailed a special power, and glamour, and if one had courage and low expectations enough to persist in it, it was better than the shit job one had after school. It was super fun to go shopping for baby clothes. Pregnancy at sixteen justified being followed by an MTV crew—no small declaration on behalf of the wider culture. This was no lame Frontline crew, mind you, reporting a social problem. Because a baby when you were young and energetic and fertile was what other people couldn’t have. It was an odd reward for not being rich and upwardly mobile—a new, alternative source of media fascination. Of course, teen pregnancy didn’t lead to car keys; quite the oppo
site, as when we saw new mother Farrah unable, despite begging and tears, to get her mom to help her lease a Ford Focus so she could get out of the house sometimes on her own. Early pregnancy was declassing. Even this unusually wealthy-ish cheerleader had to surrender plans for college, eliminate her social life, and spend her time caring for the kid. Her after-school telemarketing job, shown in the first minutes of the program, at the end seemed like a lifetime fate. Or the teen could hand the baby over to a nice wealthy couple in their mid-to-late thirties, as Catelynn did on the season finale. I don’t know if either tale was cautionary. It all seems grim; yet the pregnancy series, as much as the party series, is unavoidably, unbelievably watchable, not in the manner of PBS-style vitamin-rich sociological documentary, but Technicolored. Did I mention the cartoon intertitles? The chirping first-person narration of each episode? It was a realization of a different social fantasy.
The adult bourgeois version of this fantasy, one that unites the extremes of rich and poor, was the overdiscussed Juno (2007). That dumb movie briefly generated an opinion-page debate, got four Academy Award nominations, and won one (for its screenplay). Some thought it was antiabortion (because its teen protagonist decided to carry her pregnancy to term). Some thought it encouraged teenage pregnancy. The missed point of the movie was the fantasy of a natural solidarity and reciprocity between still poorish, too-young girls, who are superfecund, and richish, too-old professional women, who can no longer easily conceive. This is why it is a romantic comedy: all men to the side, the two ages and life paths of woman must find each other. Juno finally hands off her baby to the wife in the rich thirty-or-forty-something couple that had pleaded to adopt her child. The husband, played by Jason Bateman, had turned out to be a jerk, unready for fatherhood, possibly coming on to Juno—illustration of the eternal juvenility of wealthy men, since they can conceive with younger paramours until they die. (Of a Viagra overdose, presumably.) If the American dream of mobility succeeds, the poor young girl will eventually turn into the rich middle-aged professional. Cosmic justice will then require some new teen, as yet unknown, to hand Juno a new accidental baby, once Juno has finished law school and completed her climb to the top.
Nadya Suleman infuriated everyone because she had attained the egocentric maximum at each pole. But she did not mediate. She did not solve. Blithe as a sixteen-year-old, living with her beleaguered parents, battling before the cameras with her mom, Angela, who counseled restraint (“I was really upset at the doctor. He promised not to do this again”), while Nadya made gag-me-with-a-spoon faces of adolescent disdain, she was TV’s most ne’er-do-well underage mom. Yet she was as devoted to her children as any mature mother. No one ever doubted she was genuinely loving, gentle, and good with the kids; you could tell as much just from short bits of footage. Most important, she had all the gravity and purpose—and legal and professional capital—of a thirty-three-year-old from a rising middle class, calm and comfortable in the presence of authority (whether paparazzi or Child Protective Services), unintimidated by police (they exist to protect her from criminals!), knowing how, very politely, to stand on her rights.
Octomom just timed it badly. She raised fears that babies have become a rare commodity, a status item, property—at a moment when property itself was being allocated to the wrong people. There was indeed something unsavory but not unfamiliar in Nadya’s defensiveness whenever she thought (often incorrectly) that someone was implying others should adopt from her fourteen. This in addition to the hysteria and 911 calls when, as will happen with fourteen kids, she misplaced one.
Rights in advanced societies have a tendency to turn into rights-to-biology once both democracy and the minimum necessities of life have been ensured. The matters on our rights agenda in 2010 are not freedom of speech at all (what would you like to say, citizen, that you can’t already legally say?), but rights to the use of your body, rights to babies, rights to sex, rights to health; or battles over the correct boundaries of these things, as in the right to life, the status of fetuses, the line where therapy becomes enhancement. The space of the womb—location of “reproductive privacy,” against the intrusions of the state—becomes precisely the space into which one invites medical interventions: abortions if preserving the right to choose, implantations if improving fertility.
And yet the real determinants—the means, the practical restrictions, the horizons of possibility—for all these “personal” things winds up being the old, male, mathematical, formal, realms of financial economy that the official parts of our culture are afraid to touch and will not name. Even if Nadya Suleman was a scapegoat for those who had truly done us harm, she and the financiers were also different maximizations of a complex whose separate parts are growing together. The popular print and broadcast press chose which one, of two parts, we would have steady access to and ready judgments of: the easy one, the feminine, the lower middle class, the thoughtless. Not the male, the upper class, and (as the financial instruments were routinely described) the “sophisticated” and “innovative.” That choice was a moral failure and an act of cowardice. Yet the hatred and the rage that followed—the commentators’ rage, the popular rage—were not entirely untrue or unrevealing. Nadya Suleman had multiplied as if by magic a class of biological assets other people had to work for, compete for. She played a version of the drama of our time in the marionette theater of her womb. The financiers multiplied treasures, the means of life, too. But we were hostage then to the financiers, and still are.
In March 2009, AIG financiers in Connecticut hired private security forces and warned of danger to their families because of “populist rage” supposedly stoked by the press. But when The New York Times called the police departments of the towns where the anonymous financiers lived, spokespersons reported no knowledge of any threats. “We haven’t heard of it,” Sergeant Carol Ogrinc of the New Canaan Police told the Times. “There have been no complaints made to our department.”*2
On April Fools’ Day, a group of people snatched a child seat from Nadya Suleman’s porch and smashed it through the back window of her Toyota minivan. “Obviously, this is quite a unique situation,” said Lieutenant Fred Wiste of the La Habra Police. “As a matter of course we have increased patrol checks around her home.”
[2010]
* * *
*1 He was Martin J. Sullivan, who led AIG for three fatal years, 2005 to 2008, after the company’s notorious previous chief, Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg, left under a cloud of accusations of misstatement of earnings. Sullivan was last known to live in Chappaqua, New York, in Westchester, if any news organizations cared to sit on his lawn. Greenberg, now CEO of the AIG-linked insurer C. V. Starr & Co. (Starr founded AIG), and currently very active in lobbying Congress to adopt more favorable policies toward AIG (in which his firm still has a large financial stake), lives near Central Park. Joseph Cassano, responsible for the AIG Financial Products division whose credit-default swaps were at the center of the meltdown, lives happily and wealthily in London. Angelo Mozilo, founder of Countrywide, originator of a disproportionate quantity of troubled mortgages and responsible for massive foreclosures, lives in his mansion in Santa Monica and speculates in real estate for his own amusement. Richard Fuld, head of Lehman Brothers when it collapsed, has restarted his deal making at an investment firm called Matrix Advisors in Manhattan. You can find their addresses online. Why not write one of them a letter?
*2 This was during the period when AIG was under fire for $168 million in “retention bonuses,” paid by the newly bailed-out company, to executives of its Financial Products division, the division that caused the disaster. The press broke the story of this use of taxpayer funds in March 2009, without identification of names, leading to congressional interest and an unusually high level of public complaint against the financiers. New York State attorney general Andrew Cuomo subpoenaed lists of the bonus recipients and threatened to make their names public. AIG top executives Edward Liddy (since retired) and Gerry Pasciucco announced that na
ming names would endanger the executives’ families (hence the show of bodyguards) and, anyway, the recipients promised voluntarily to give the bonuses back; thus, AIG didn’t need legal intervention into its salary contracts, or the replacement of the employees in question. Cuomo held back the names, and the main print and broadcast outlets stopped following the story. Nine months later, in January 2010, almost in passing, an outside contributor to The New York Times—Steven Brill, in a Sunday Magazine profile of the government pay czar Kenneth Feinberg—noted that he’d learned during his research on Feinberg that the AIG executives who promised to return the bonuses had lied. “All but two have since reneged,” Brill reported.
II
THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE
(THE MEANING OF LIFE, PART I)
So many conditions conspire to make life intolerable. A life is too short. You get only one of them. You find, living among other people, that every person has his own life, visible and desirable, and you can’t enter it; true as well for other lives past and future.
Cursed you seem, in certain moods. You are a man and not a woman, or a woman and not a man. You were born one person rather than two, or many. You are alive now instead of then. The morbid person knows he was born to die, but even the short time until the end he doesn’t know how to fill. The optimist says we were born for life, and in solitary hours fears he doesn’t live. Looking around at the dumb show, you see events flying past and can’t close on anything solid. Memory floats you back to days that will never be repeated, letting you know you didn’t appreciate them when they occurred. You move behind the time, like a clock continually losing seconds, and despair.
