The cultural journalist and writer Júlia Bertran’s desire to have a child exploded in her face. She did it suddenly, when she had already reached an age in which the chances of becoming a mother naturally had fallen drastically. There began, first, an investigation into the sudden strength of his desire and the path he had taken until then. But the journey through assisted reproduction also began: diagnoses, tests, treatments, attempts, possibilities. And many contradictions as a feminist, the biggest: resorting to egg donation. What would all this mean for the woman who would donate her eggs? Was it going to be really mother if her genes were not in her son? How to deal with that discomfort and genetic grief? Bertran decided that the way to deal with all that was to sit down and write a book that the publisher KO books has now posted: Dear stranger.
Does the threat of regret for not having had children still weigh heavily in our society?
It is one of the most recurring phrases that they tell you when you are in a stage of your life as a woman, and I think it resonates a lot. As I say in the book, I don’t know if it is due to unconsciousness, ignorance of our bodies and our reproductive processes, or this imaginary of reproductive ease that Sara Lafuente Funes talks about, that we think that today, even if we are late, everything It’s possible… I didn’t feel much pressure to be a mother, although it was something very present in my entire environment. I thought that I didn’t want to be one, but I didn’t have references of non-mothers to reflect on them either. So the social mandate was weighing, but I was avoiding it.
There is a moment in the book that says ‘well, we tried, but we didn’t get too excited, if it doesn’t happen, nothing happens’. However, then the opposite happens: the obsession comes and the difficulty of knowing when to stop assisted reproduction processes because they want to get pregnant at all costs. Is it difficult to give up once you get into the cycle of treatments?
I was the first one surprised to see how something that I had not really wanted in life suddenly became inalienable. In the book I try to pull that thread, discover why this change. I think that, on the one hand, when you start trying you open that possibility in your mind and suddenly the desire explodes in your face. Even if you say that you are going to do it without getting overwhelmed, that idea has already infiltrated your imagination and is fed as you try it.
Those of my generation were greatly influenced by a discourse that demonized motherhood as a possible space for female emancipation. For me, motherhood was just giving up freedoms, possibilities. When I thought about it the other way around, if not having children is also a renunciation, there was a big change.
Some questions arise for me: to what extent have I denied myself a desire or that desire was indeed latent in me? To what extent did I prefer not to pay attention to it, did I not want to see it due to many issues that I address in the book, like having other ambitions in life and feeling that they were incompatible? There is like a feminist trip: I tried to rebel against this social mandate to be a mother, but it can turn against us.
Is the search for one’s own desire for motherhood necessarily contaminated by mandates and other ideas that we have constructed from very different places?
I, and perhaps those of my generation, were greatly influenced by a discourse that demonized motherhood as a possible space for female emancipation. I thank the feminists who in the 60s and 70s fought so that we could free ourselves from this social mandate, what happens is that we must review all these advances because society changes and what at a given moment was a conquest of freedoms, Now maybe it’s not. For me, motherhood was just giving up freedoms, possibilities, due to a very neoliberal mentality and not understanding care and parenting as a space for joy and even growth. When I asked myself the opposite, that is, if not having children is also a renunciation or what am I giving up by prioritizing my professional life and my individual freedom, there was a big change.
Maybe then we also lack references of mothers with interesting or joyful lives in which many different things fit?
Yes, although these stories have more and more visibility and we understand that, as Adrienne Rich said in the 70s, one thing is to demonize the experience of motherhood and the other is to demonize the maternal institution, understood as a set of disciplinary norms that have imposed patriarchy about what this motherhood should be like. For me, this differentiation is very important, because I do not want to succumb to motherhood understood according to patriarchal canons, but why do I have to give up the experience of motherhood, when it is one of the most transcendental that we can live?
In the book it says that fertility clinics are full of feminists with contradictions, why?
When I started with the reproduction processes and with my ethical dilemmas, I felt very guilty, very bad and I lived it very, very alone at the beginning. reading the book Reproductive markets, by Sara Lafuente Funes, in which she says that there are many feminists dealing with their contradictions, I felt like I was not alone. That is a bit of the germ of the book, socializing these dilemmas and processes.
What do these contradictions have to do with?
On the one hand, it is the fact of feeding a highly commercialized reproduction system, highly mediated by the market and economic interests. And then – in my case, when I came to egg donation – it was thinking about what another woman has to go through, what risks another woman has to take who will surely have a much more vulnerable situation than mine in order for me to fulfill a wish. What consequences does my desire have on another woman’s body? You also think that donors are women of legal age with the ability to think for themselves and why do you have to decide for them. But also, can they really decide freely in a context that makes them precarious?
One thing is to demonize the experience of motherhood and the other is to demonize the maternal institution, understood as a set of disciplinary norms that patriarchy has imposed on what this motherhood should be like. This differentiation is very important, because I do not want to succumb to motherhood understood according to patriarchal canons, but why do I have to give up the experience of motherhood, when it is one of the most transcendental that we can live?
At first it was very difficult for me to talk about this topic because I felt like I was betraying myself as a feminist woman. It is very difficult to put this topic in the public conversation when it causes you pain or so many difficulties, but also because there is a very romanticized discourse about these assisted reproduction processes. There is also a lot of misinformation about the impact that treatments or donations have on women’s bodies, or about how our law and the reproduction industry, not at all harmless, work.
Is the expansion of assisted reproduction supplying a discourse with public policies about what to do with motherhood/fatherhood and everything that this implies in terms of economics, housing, employment, conciliation…?
Many experts have already said that the assisted reproduction industry ultimately offers individual, elitist, private, commercialized solutions to a problem that is structural and social. We should go to the root, which is why we delay motherhood so much, and not put more weight only on women, because reproduction is an issue that should challenge the entire society. There is a lot of talk about co-responsibility in parenting, but we are also going to talk about co-responsibility in reproduction. What we should demand are measures so that people who want to have children can do so with certain guarantees and not draw the curtain on fertility clinics. It is magnificent that science progresses and that we can have more and more techniques to help us conceive children, but that should not inhibit measures so that everyone can decide whether or not to have children.
One of the conclusions of the book is that the weakest link in the chain is the egg donors, who are compensated with a limited amount of money while the clinics make large profits. What proposals can be made based on that conclusion?
Altruism is a candid alibi for egg donation to be socially accepted. Studies have been done that investigate the reasons that lead these women to donate and many times there is a part of wanting to help other women, I have spoken with some of them and this exists. The thing is that we cannot say that it is pure altruism because it is not true, there is an economic compensation of about a thousand euros.
The contradictions come from feeding a reproduction system highly mediated by the market and economic interests. In my case, when I came to egg donation, it was thinking about what another woman has to go through, what risks another woman has to take who will surely have a much more vulnerable situation than mine in order for me to fulfill a wish. But you also think that donors are women of legal age with the capacity to think for themselves, although can they really decide freely in a context that makes them precarious?
And taking into account how precarious salaries are in this country, a thousand euros is money and the economic factor is also key for many young women. For me it is very important to make visible the processes that these girls go through, to make them more transparent so that everyone really knows what they consist of and to be able to guarantee that these women do it safely, physically and psychologically.
Has writing this book served to alleviate some of the contradictions you encountered in the process of having a child through assisted reproduction? How has your genetic grief evolved?
This is not a solution because the contradiction is there, but in the book I address exactly how to inhabit it, because we live in a society in which it is very difficult not to have contradictions between our way of life and our way of thinking. There are contradictions deeper than others, and this one was very deep because there is a little person that emerges from these processes, my son emerges from this contradiction. Writing the book or talking about it is the way to convert the guilt I felt into responsibility, because guilt can silence, block, paralyze. This is my way of taking responsibility for my guilt.
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