Sunday, December 9, 2001		Article

Not of my flesh
Shobha Vishwanath

KAVYA is 42. Having suffered a bad marriage for 10 years, she is on the brink of a divorce. Currently separated from here husband, she lives and works in a different country. Not involved in any other relationship as her mind has not found closure with her marriage, she lives a single, lonely life.

Kavya also suffers from endometriosis, a condition that has completely clogged one of her fallopian tubes and left the other one only partially open. Her pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) leaves her irritable, bloated and with migraine. Her period, when it finally does arrive, incapacitates her for three days. In a month, all she gets is two weeks of anxiety-free time.

But Kavya will not seek medical intervention for her suffering. Her reason: she is so desperate to bear a child that she will suffer unbearable pain and severe stress in order to do so. Her fear is that any medical intervention to alleviate her pain will ruin her chances of childbearing. For Kavya, natural conception has been ruled out. Her chances of conceiving through an IVF are 50 per cent, or so she is led to believe. Kavya hangs on to this 50 per cent.

The odds against Kavya’s ability to bear a child are huge. Age, endometriosis and last but a not-to-be-taken-lightly factor in her life: her single status.

Whether Kavya will ever summon the courage to conceive by IVF with an unknown donor sperm and raise it singly, given her need to be ‘socially accepted’, seems an unlikely possibility. Yet Kavya continues to live in her unreal world with the hope of giving birth to a child. Kavya’s need is to ‘bear’ a child. Not to have one; because for her, adoption is not even a remote consideration.

There are many Kavyas. Single ones, married ones, to whom the idea of adoption borders on the blasphemous. But the added irony with Kavya is the fact that she is a child psychologist. As a part of a huge organisation that caters to the mental health of children, she, more than most, knows how love transforms both the physical and mental health of a child. Everyday she is witness to many children who come from abusive homes, careless parents, neglect and cruelty and with whom the sure cure is love, care and security.

Yet, for Kavya, adoption is not a choice.

"I have to mentally prepare myself", she says, when it is pointed out that adoption in her situation is a wonderful and viable option.

Why is adoption rarely a consideration for building a family? Are ties of blood superior in some way to the bonds of love? How does one compare parenthood by procreation to parenthood through adoption? Is procreation the only prerequisite of parenthood? Granted the fact that childbearing could be a natural desire for most women, but is that the only reason for which one has a child? Is that all that being a parent is about? To beget one’s own?

Yet, adopting a child is often looked upon as a brave undertaking. But is the ability to love and encompass another human being in one’s life, an act of courage?

Surely we have all been there in the act of falling in love, in the act of marriage? Our spouses are not linked to us by blood. Yet, without ‘mentally preparing oneself’ most people commit themselves to the act of marriage and spend the rest of their lives with partners who are neither linked to them by blood or often, even by love. We accept them with all their baggage: mental, physical, emotional and genetic. Not just them, in most cases their families as well.

We accept these adults who come in their set and unchanging ways, with all their preferences and prejudices, adults with whom ‘nature’ has no more room for moulding. We accept them and love them. And yet we hesitate to extend that very same love, to open our hearts to an infant who is not flesh of our flesh, or blood of our blood.

"Who knows where this child has come from," goes the oft-heard argument. "Who knows how it will grow up to be? Who knows if it will turn against us? Who knows if it will leave us in search of its ‘real’ parents? Who knows what religion, what caste this child belongs to?"

There are various other reasons that prevent the Kavyas of this world from adopting a child. Some say it is a man’s need for posterity. To immortalise ourselves in our children and their children so that our images will be carried on generation after generation.

But is there no immortality in the love that we bestow on the children we adopt, is there no posterity to the values we inculcate in them, is there no longevity to the bonds of relationships we foster in them?

My belief rests in love. I know that it is the love and commitment with which I raise my biological son and my adopted daughter that will prove immortal. That neither child is better or worse than the other by the mere fact of how or to whom they were physically born. I refuse to let my love be dictated by two twisted strands of DNA. — WFS