Meghan McCain doesn’t like the idea of artificial wombs.

She doesn’t like the idea of wombs outside a woman’s body.

She doesn’t like scientists “messing with embryos.” (For those utilizing IVF, I’m sure you weren’t aware of this, but “messing” is the clinical term for what embryologists do with your gametes.)

She doesn’t like people messing with fetuses.  (Again, “messing” is a clinical term.)

She doesn’t like it, and it makes her violently uncomfortable.

Can we pause for a moment and unpack that term?  Violently uncomfortable.  Is she saying that as she becomes uncomfortable, she becomes violent? (Watch out!)  Is she saying that the discomfort feels like violence to her psyche?  Is she saying that the violent side of her personality is suffering from discomfort?  Or are her emotions just “messing” with her?

TakePart Live’s theme was “In the next 20 years, artificial wombs will be a real possibility, but will ethics get in the way?”

What do you think of artificial wombs? Will they be a good thing? #BabyFarms

— TakePart Live (@TakePartLive) August 12, 2014

Well, will it?

I understand that Meghan McCain believes that life begins at conception, and if scientists were indeed “messing” with life without a second thought to the ramifications of their actions, throwing gametes together like the Swedish Chef on the Muppets (bork! bork! bork!), I could understand her fears. But we have a long history of having children grow outside a mother’s womb even if their life didn’t begin inside this artificial space.

It’s called an incubator.

(Though “babyfarm” sounds clickier, right? I mean, who would click on #incubator? But #babyfarm — that’s catchy.)

Many preemie parents are familiar with the concept of their child growing and aging outside the woman’s body.  The twins stopped growing in my body at 29 weeks.  They were delivered and grown in what amounts to an artificial womb until they were able to regulate their own body temperature and be moved to an open-air crib.  This development happened slower than if they had aged in my body, but we didn’t really have a choice.  The options were slow-growing-but-alive or dead.  And we took slow-growing.  Call us crazy.  We like to “mess” with fate that way.

Today, it would be inhumane to not attempt to kept a child alive in an incubator, even though it comes with its own set of possible problems.  I can state from personal experience that growth (especially brain development) is preferable taking place inside the woman’s body vs. outside the woman’s body.  We’re still dealing with issues from prematurity.  But again, alive vs. dead… it’s a pretty easy decision.

If science were to catch up with need, and women without wombs, with malformed wombs (such as a unicornuate uterus), or poor functioning wombs (such as mine which doesn’t allow for proper implantation) could grow a healthy child inside an incubator, and that development would actually mimic life inside a human body, wouldn’t we find that preferable to making women put their body through endless tries to get one pregnancy that doesn’t miscarry or cause irreparable harm to the mother’s body?  Is it really preferable to ask women to have multiple miscarriages (which include invasive procedures such as D&Cs) or risk their life in order to keep pregnancies solely inside a woman’s body?

The ethical issue begins with the fact that we’re talking about a child already existing vs. a child being created, though if life begins at conception for Meghan McCain, I’m not sure why she would distinguish between a 29-week-old child and an embryo.

And I am not saying that there aren’t other ethical issues to consider: when do we have women utilize an artificial womb rather than attempting conception in the body, what are the long-term effects for children born via this method, what are the emotional effects of having your child grow outside your body or being grown outside a human body?  There are ethical questions that need to be discussed by those who are holding real information and true understanding of the situation and methods to address it.

I guess I’m not really understanding why we should sit and listen to Meghan McCain talk about artificial wombs.  Why is her opinion interesting?  What is it based on?  Why should it be broadcast?  Does she have professional experience?  Does she have personal experience?  Is there a possibility that she would utilize this technology in the future?

No one is stopping Meghan McCain from using the uterus in her body.  (I am making an assumption right now that she has a functioning uterus.)  She can go right ahead growing a baby inside herself, and she can also deny herself access to an artificial womb if it turns out that she can’t carry a child unassisted.

All scientists are doing is trying to solve a problem that plagues many other women: the inability to carry a child to term within their body.  The concept of helping others shouldn’t make a person violently uncomfortable.  Confused, sure.  Worried, fine.  But violently uncomfortable?  That’s a term that casts judgment.  And it’s judgment of a situation that Meghan McCain likely knows little about unless she has a secret medical degree or personal experience.

Especially when options exist in the here and now to grow a baby outside the body.

I, for one, am grateful that incubators exist.  Without them, I wouldn’t have my twins.

Image: Aurelie via Flickr

I read a line today in a friend’s Facebook status that stuck with me: “fighting for attention online.”

Yes, the Internet is an infinite space, but attention is a finite resource.  It’s sort of like the earth itself.  You can place as many humans as you wish on the surface.  The amount of physical space on this planet is so enormous that it may as well be infinite for the sake of this example.  But the resources people need to live are finite, and we can see from the way we’ve set up our societies that many people go without whereas some people have an overabundance.  In between a large chunk of people are getting by — some of whom focus on what they don’t have while others barely give the size of their resources a second thought.

And the blogopshere mirrors that.  It’s vast, though only as infinite as the number of servers that support it, and certainly there is room to keep putting sites online.  But attention becomes that finite resource akin to food or water.

There are some people who get no attention, no matter how much they try to connect with others.  And others who easily gain an enormous amount of attention.  And then there is the chunk in between who has enough attention to get by — some of whom focus on the traffic they don’t have and growing their space, while others are happy with their small blog and write for writing’s sake; to capture a slice of their life or keep friends and family informed of their goings on.

I don’t look down my nose at attention.  It’s a human need.  At our heart, we’re like Harlow’s experiment, wanting cloth-covered comfort over extra food.  And there are different sorts of attention.  There is attention seeking for personal gain (eyes on a post to increase the chances for future sponsored posts) and attention for attention sake.  Because we all need to be noticed from time to time.

Most of us don’t need a huge audience or to get anything more out of blogging than a few head nods a day, the equivalent of people calling out to us: “I see you!  You exist.”

*******

The Internet can be a wonderful space if you enter it with no needs.  And it can be an awful, damaging space if you enter seeking reaction and connection.

Because it’s a strange medium.  You post your need for comfort and then you wait.  And you hope someone reads it.  And you hope someone gives you kind thoughts or advice.  At the very least, you hope that no one shits too hard on you.

It is a passive form of communication.  Even if you curate your audience on social media, sending something out to your friend list so you know precisely who could see it, you have no clue whether the message reached the recipient.  There is too large a chance for your message to slip through the cracks.

The receiver may not have the impulse to act due to the bystander effect, hoping that someone else who reads the post or status will have a better response than one they could come up with.  They may feel ill-equipped to deal with the problem, or have no clue how to reach out in a helpful way when the methods we use in the face-to-face world are impossible in the online world.  They may carry judgments on the medium, assuming that if you were truly hurting, you’d reach out directly to individuals rather than sending your words into the ether.  Not everyone gets the Internet the same way.

I would always encourage someone to write for writing’s sake; to get the thoughts out of their head.  To record a moment in their life, even if it’s a very painful moment.  I would remind them that their words could make a difference for someone else.  We all have stories where something we read online made us feel less alone.  But I would never tell someone that the Internet is a good place to gather comfort.

The Internet isn’t even a cloth-covered wire monkey.

It’s more like the Triwizard’s tournament maze.

You may run through it unscathed because other people are making it possible for you to do so (yes, it was for nefarious reasons in the book, but still, external support cleared the path) or you may turn the corner and see a blast-ended skrewt scampering toward you.

Even those who run the gauntlet and reach the center may not find the trophy they were looking for.  As Jodifur so aptly stated this week about her blogging experience: “Sometimes fairy tales don’t end the way you want them to, but they end anyway.”

*******

That phrase stuck with me for hours after I read the status update and subsequent discussion: “fighting for attention online.”  Maybe it’s the word “fighting.”  I don’t really look at it as fighting, maybe because I don’t think the vast majority of bloggers try to push others down in order to raise their words to the surface.  We’re all posting alongside one another, but we rarely verbally push and shove.

“Struggle” is perhaps more appropriate.  Struggling for attention online.

I sometimes think of the blogosphere as a big expanse of dirt, and some posts poke out of the ground and reach me, while I know that there must be other posts underground that for some reason or another never break the surface.  I am always cognizant that I leave more things unread in the blogosphere than I get to read.  I worry about those posts that remain underground, that never poke my personal surface.  What sorts of things are written in them?  Are they calls for comfort that I am inadvertently missing, and in doing so, negatively affecting someone else’s life?  That thought sort of sucks.

“Struggle” calls to mind the fact that attention is something you need to constantly be getting, and the struggle for it is exhausting.  Attention isn’t something you can count on from day-to-day.  One post may get hundreds of reads and dozens of comments, but that isn’t enough for the vast majority of people seeking attention from the Internet.  You want your next post to get that too.  And your next post to get that much attention or even more.  How many people sit back and say, “yeah, I once had a great response to a post so I certainly don’t need that again.”

*******

We’re navigating the online world with the twins now, letting them take baby steps into a world where external commentary rules.  Right?  The metrics and the comments and the depth of comments and the number of friends and the speed with which people respond…

The moment you leave the default settings in place, you invite all that self-doubt in.  You take a hard situation — getting through life — and potentially make it harder.  Or you make it better.  See, that’s the thing.  You have no clue how it will go because the Internet is a passive medium that expects you to just sit and wait.

When you need comfort, be direct.  Ask for it by reaching out to individuals.  Don’t post vague statements online.  Don’t write detailed explanations online.  If you need something whether it is advice or a hug or something much larger — medical intervention — be direct.  Getting your needs fulfilled should not be a guessing game; a peek at who cares enough to step forward.

I want the twins’ journey through the online world to make their daily life easier.  That has been my experience.  I’ve been very lucky that my online interactions have been — for the most part — positive.  Social media and blogging are mediums that have enriched my life.  The online community has brought me comfort on numerous occasions.  I worry that they won’t have a positive experience, mostly because I know that a lot of people don’t.

I don’t worry so much that they’ll grow up focused on the metrics and commentary because before the Internet, there were always friends to count or opinions to hear in the face-to-face world.  But I worry that they — and all people — are being conditioned to post and wait for the reaction.

*******

A lot of people are writing about their experience with depression today due to Robin Williams’s death.  I’ve read more than once this morning someone pointing out how upset people are about Robin Williams yet their own friends struggle with depression and they ignore them.  I’ve read more than one person talk about how they write about their depression online, and yet help doesn’t come.

It’s completely valid, and I can see how they reach those conclusions.  But the Internet isn’t a safety net — at least, it is not a dependable safety net.  It seems to be a safety net for some and a flimsy sheet for others when they jump with their words.

If you are struggling right now, please contact resources directly.  Talk to someone you trust.  And if you don’t have someone in your face-to-face world to talk to, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Josh told me about Robin Williams while I was in the middle of cooking dinner.

I spent most of the time that I was stirring the sauce thinking about his children.

Then I thought about the Mork suspenders I wore in elementary school, and how I got bullied for wearing them, not least of which because Mork was a boy and I was a girl.  I remember letting them dangle off my shoulders, like Marty McFly, and wondering if that made it any better.  (Side note: it didn’t.)

And then I thought about the summer I saw Dead Poets Society six times in the theater.  Back then, a movie came out and you watched it more than once if you really liked it because (1) it would be more than a year before it was released on tape, and (2) the chances of your parents buying you the tape to own was slim-to-none.

I was a volunteer at a hospital that summer, changing linens and making beds, and when I had free time, I would go and sit in people’s rooms and play cards with them.  I mostly picked elderly women, but there was one guy whose room I went to often who was 26, so we had conversations beyond, “do you have a beau?”  He had been in the hospital for weeks, so he hadn’t seen Dead Poets Society, and I got to tell him the whole plotline since he would miss the theatrical run and have to wait a year to see the movie.

He thought it was ridiculous that I kept going back to see the same film instead of seeing a new film, but I argued that I was seeing it with different people and therefore it felt like a different film each time.

And finally I just told him the truth: the movie made me feel good.  For two hours, despite the sad ending, I felt really happy visiting those characters.  They made me so happy that I bought the novelization of the movie from B. Dalton’s in the mall, even though novelizations of movies were always crap.

There are so many times in life when you feel awful; if you can grab two hours and feel really happy, shouldn’t you grab it as many times as you can?

It’s the end of summer, which always makes me weepy.  It used to make me happy, back when I was in school.  I liked school.  I liked the structure of school.  I wasn’t a fan of summer, with its long, creeping days that didn’t take on any particular shape.  Now, it is the opposite.  I wait all year for summer, and start dreading the return to school at the beginning of August.  It feels like every fall takes me closer to THE fall, the one where the twins leave for college.

I can’t write those words without crying.

I’m a fucking wreck, and they’re still in elementary school.

*******

Josh has been making a lot of changes, careerwise, and trying out new skills just for the fun of it, such as the Radio Race.  It feels like fall is going to be a restart of sorts for him, and it’s certainly a restart for the kids as they enter a new grade.

For a few weeks, it has felt like everyone else has gotten new school supplies in their toolbox, and I’m left with my stubby, half-used crayons.  Yes, my job looks different from day-to-day; it’s always changing, so that part is nice.  But if I look at it from another angle, it’s also always the same.  My hobbies have been trucking along for years now, especially since I gave up guitar.  I loved learning guitar.  I did not so much love practicing guitar.  So after two years of lessons, I went back to my old hobbies.  And that’s where I’ve been ever since.

It didn’t bother me when no one else around me was reveling in newness.

But it has bothered me more and more as fall moves closer.

*******

I found a new hobby — game-making — a few weeks ago.  It started with an uphill learning curve which made me feel very smart when I mastered the skill.  I worked very hard on my first project, and by the time I was ready for people to see it, I was thinking that I had found my calling in life.  This is who I was meant to be.  I was going to do this forever.  It made me feel so good.

Do you know how I felt?  Like at the end of A Mighty Wind, when Harry Shearer said, “After that concert I realized I want to spend as much of the rest of my life as possible playing folk music with these gentlemen. And I want to spend all of it as a woman.”  I already am a woman, so I have that covered, but I wanted to spend as much of the rest of my life as possible with my new hobby.

But it got a lukewarm reception.

Not a bad reception, just a lukewarm one.

I’m not really being fair.  Josh pointed out that no one was ever going to be able to match the excitement of someone who feels really really good doing something new.  In the same way that you can be excited about your friend’s wedding, but you’re never going to match her excitement on embarking on her new life.

So I’ve taken my expectations down a notch.  Down a few notches.  It’s good enough if someone enjoys what I made for a few minutes.  I’m aiming lower than a superlative like fantastic, best, or even, super neat-o.  I’ll call it a success if most people say, “oh… cool!”

I guess you can say that I found a new hobby to fill the gap that fall always brings, and a new community to go with it.  And it feels like returning to school, moving back into some sort of structure that holds up my day.

Which is a long way of saying that I think I’ve figured out what I want to be when I grow up.

Have you figured out what you want to be yet?

Josh went on a radio race last weekend with KCRW. He received the theme for the contest on Saturday afternoon, and then had 24 hours to pull together a four-minute radio clip. It was his first time doing something like this, and I love the end result.

The theme was “You Should Know” and this was Josh’s entry if you want to listen.

Good story, nu?

Check out the name of his team. The Glym.ph lives!