Mark Oppenheimer expresses anxiety over talking to his children about artificial insemination – “to be more precise, I don’t want to talk about sperm donation.” He thinks through his “very specific revulsions toward what I perceive to be the misuse, or over-use, of science” and ultimately chills out:
My anxiety about lesbian mothers with strollers is silly. I know that. It scapegoats the lesbian for the choices of the straight couple: Plenty of sperm donation leads to non-lesbian parenting, after all. And I am obviously relying on an incoherent distinction between what is “artificial” and what is “natural,” in an age when the technologies everyone likes—the ultrasound, the prenatal vitamin, the autoclave to sanitize surgical instruments, Purell—are seen as beneficial, and are granted honorary “natural” status. No doubt I am also engaging in the sacred parental rite of judging other parents for anything I can find, assuring myself that whatever deviates from what my wife and I do, including different means of conception, is at least a little bit worse. That, too, is silly. But what’s really silly is worrying about the conversations sperm-donor mothers will provoke with my children. Because, as any parent knows, conversations with young people about sex never go as badly as you fear. In fact, they don’t go anywhere you could possibly predict.
My wife tells this story.
About a year and a half ago, she was returning from dropping our eldest daughter off at kindergarten; the baby was strapped to her chest, and she was pushing our middle daughter, Ellie, then almost three years old, in the stroller. Out of nowhere, Ellie asked that question, the one that all children ask at some point in their toddling years: “Mommy, how do you make a baby?” My wife was a bit surprised to get this question—why now? so early in the day?—but it didn’t matter, for there was only one possible answer, the straightforward, clinical, correct answer. “Well,” she said, “the man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina, seed comes out, and the baby begins to grow.” At this point Ellie turned around in the stroller and squinted at my wife with skepticism, her eyes narrowed and her lips puckered. “Mommy,” she said, “if the man puts his penis in the woman, how does he put it back on?”
After stifling a laugh, my wife explained the situation to Ellie’s satisfaction, at which point the topic was dropped—presumably in favor of more important questions, like whether she had earned back the dessert she had lost in that morning’s tantrum.
The Dish 