Late-in-life offspring may also exhaust financial resources: though the fee paid for donor eggs generally ranges between $2,000 and $5,000, one particularly picky couple has offered $50,000 for the eggs of a tall Ivy League student with SAT scores over 1400. The costs of these babies don't end with their conception, of course. Economist David Card, Ph.D., of the University of California-Berkeley, who studies the financial burdens of older parents, predicts that older mothers will have to work five to 10 years longer than other mothers to pay for their postmenopausal progeny. Still, the increasing number of older mothers suggests that many find it worth the price.
Lesbian Moms
At one time, lesbian mothers were themselves a late-blooming breed: they usually conceived their children in a heterosexual union, only later discovering or declaring themselves homosexual. But assisted reproductive technology has created a whole new class of lesbian moms, who use a donor's sperm to conceive and raise a child in a lesbian-headed household from the very beginning.
Many studies over many years have found that lesbian moms do just as good a job of raising their kids as heterosexual moms do: their children don't differ significantly on measures of intellectual development, gender identity, sexual orientation, peer group, or self-esteem. Not surprisingly, the kids of lesbians seem to have a higher degree of tolerance for differences in others.
The question now occupying many researchers who study lesbian motherhood is whether those who have children through donor insemination differ from those who conceived the old-fashioned way. They do--but in ways that affect parenting only indirectly.
While members of the first group are usually firmly ensconced in their identities as lesbians, and have a committed female partner with whom they plan to co-parent the child, more recently emerged lesbians may still be dealing with the emotional fallout from two major life transitions. "Divorced lesbian mothers have come through an experience of great change: the divorce or breakup with the father of their children, and their own coming-out as lesbians," says Charlotte Patterson, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia who has studied both kinds of lesbian mothers.
Psychiatrist Nanette Gartrell, M.D., of the University of California-San Francisco, has examined the effects of discrimination on lesbian mothers and their children. She adds that recently declared and recently divorced lesbians may also have to confront external and internalized homophobia for the first time, and may be caught up in custody battles in which their sexual orientation is an issue (in many states, the law permits the removal of children from homes with a lesbian mother). "Any sort of psychological or interpersonal struggle on the part of the mother is going to have an impact on the child," she notes. Lesbians who conceive through donor insemination, on the other hand, are largely free from such dilemmas.
They're also raising their children in a remarkably egalitarian environment: studies have shown that chores and child care are much more evenly divided in lesbian households than in heterosexual homes. In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same: it's still mom who cleans and cooks, but sometimes there are two moms who are performing the tasks.
Multiple-Birth Moms
Multiple birth mothers must often find themselves recalling the old chestnut that advises us to be careful what we wish for. Like other ART mothers, they desperately wanted a child, and often went to great effort and expense to get one. Instead of one, however, they got two, or three, or four, or five... on up to the Chukwu octuplets conceived with the help of fertility drugs and born last December in Houston.
The number of multiple births has skyrocketed over the past decade, partly because more older women are having babies: the rate of twin births rises with the age of the mother. But the increase is also attributable to the use of fertility drugs that stimulate the ovaries to release more eggs, and to assisted reproduction techniques that place more than one egg at a time in a woman's body
Studies of these mothers find that they all have at least one thing in common: they're tired. Really tired. Research also shows that they're more likely to be depressed; in one study, self-reports of depression were five times higher among mothers of twins than in those who had given birth to a single child.
Feelings of fatigue and depression do take a toll: twins are less likely to be breast-fed, receive fewer demonstrations of affection, and engage in fewer verbal exchanges with their parents than singletons. Twins are also more likely to be abused, due no doubt to the additional stress their parents experience. What's more, the arrival of twins can mean that the needs of other children in the family are neglected, especially in the case of a single older child. The trauma these children can experience as a result of the sudden redirection of parental energies toward junior siblings has been termed "twinshock."
Tags:
annie murphy paul,
assisted reproduction,
divorce,
erma bombeck,
family,
fatherhood,
first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization,
lesbian moms,
moms and dads,
mother and father,
motherhood,
oldest profession,
parenting,
postmenopausal women,
reproductive technology,
single date,
single fathers,
social shifts,
sperm donor,
surrogate mothers,
teetering on the edge,
test tube,
triplets,
welter
