A Word In Edgewise: The Ladies, God Bless ‘Em*

Julia Child, Frida Kahlo, Katherine Hepburn…

So many women childless, by chance or choice, yet muddling through to lead lives of great impact. Artists, writers, thinkers whose impact on society is ongoing.

Martha Graham, Hattie McDaniel, Georgia O’Keeffe…

Dancers, actresses, painters of renown, and the nameless others, whose singleness served ailing parents or other family needs–unheralded lives whose families couldn’t have flourished without them. 

Fanny Farmer, Mary Cassatt, Emily Dickinson…

Should, every single (sic) female, as some now preach, marry and reproduce? Again and again? Some, mostly males, think they should. So much hue and cry from the baritone section.

Sally Ride, Jane Austen, Amelia Earhart, Taylor Swift…

Shrill insistence on marriage and fecundity by fiat, yet The New York Times, July 25, drawing on research from the Pew Research Center reports a growing reticence of even the married to consider reproducing. The bottom line; the numbers of nay-sayers reveal a 10-percent rise between 2018 and 2023 (37-47%) of those under 50 choosing not to propagate (among that group are some 64 percent of those who would be impregnated, a lesser–yet substantial–50 percent of the potential inseminators.)

Helen Mirren, Marisa Tomei, Harper Lee, Annie Oakley…

However: there is a growing segment of the population eager to start a two-parent family that the strident voices are ignoring: Same-sex couples in the GLBTQ community. These couples are pushing, to little effect, for fertility equality in parenting building benefits. One lesbian couple describes a Connecticut-based insurance company that covers fertility procedures (IUI – intrauterine insemination and IVI ­– in vitro insemination) but only for heterosexual sex.

Willa Cather, Beatrix Potter, Jeannette Rankin, Stevie Nicks…

In the case of same-sex partners, both men and women are being denied the right to build a family. Without coverage, a single IVF cycle involves three weeks to collect eggs, fertilize in lab then transfer to a uterus; some $20,000 a pop, and 12 months of out-of- pocket attempts before insurance would kick in. 

Barbara Pym, Carmen Miranda, Marian Anderson…

It’s even more difficult for gay men. A surrogate and egg donation can cost $200,000. One male couple, both lawyers, found they’d never reach their insurer’s definition of “infertility,” (the thresholder qualifier for covered IVF). April 22, 2022, they filed a class-action discrimination complaint with the Equal Employee Opportunity Commission (EEOC) seeking a nationwide order that employers must extend fertility benefits to LGBTQ employees. It’s still pending.  

Florence Nightingale, Lorraine Hansberry, Marilyn Monroe…

Couples willing to pay even without insurance to be able to start and nurture a family would seem to have the best of intentions, though of course not all same-sex marriages will succeed. Still, there are no “Ooops!” moments; each child is planned and wanted. Why insist that all women married to men must have children (plural) and stay married even when beaten? Why not use the rhetoric and funding to support couples who want to have children? 

Ladies of Llangollen, Paulette Goddard, Sandra Oh…

Standing behind a growing group (more than 100,000 same-sex couples are raising kids in America today) makes more sense than demanding any spouse, female or male, stay where there is physical abuse? How will overt brutality affect their children–or does it matter as long as they submit to the exhorter’s agenda? 

*A Tip ‘o the hat to Helen Hokinson, cartoonist (1,800 in The New Yorker). Childless.