TEXANNE writes:

In this New York magazine article, “Parents of a Certain Age,” a piece about older mothers who conceive artifically, there’s not even a passing glance at possible emotional and psychological implications for the real live children themselves. There are millions of these Brave-New-World children who make up the next generation — particularly prevalent among the class which will be shaping and enforcing thought. What concept of the connection between love, sex and procreation (let alone the very definitions of male and female) will these children have? How does a person feel when he realizes that an order was placed for him, with genetic material delivered at a convenient time for the discerning customer?

Laura writes:

New York magazine is no more likely to offend its professional, materialistic audience than it is to turn down an ad from Roche Bobois. But in fairness to Lisa Miller, the author of the piece, she does go on at length about the disadvantages to children. She then dismisses them all. In responding to objections, she denies common sense and the interests of children out-of-hand and accepts the unsubstantiated phenomenon of “ageism.” She is more concerned about possible injury to the self-regard of fully grown professionals than any harm to the vulnerable and powerless young. (But then who buys watches from Roche Bobois? Children or adults?) The fact that the offspring of these old mothers will not have energetic parents and will be coping with the old age of their parents while they are in college or in their twenties just doesn’t concern her.

Nor is she concerned about the psychological consequences of having been conceived with a stranger’s eggs or never knowing one’s real mother. The artificial reproduction market in the U.S. is unregulated and exploitive of children. Feminists have no qualms about the commercializing of human reproduction. Once again, we see how feminism cheapens and devalues the essential in femininity. Miller writes:

Here is why the arguments against old parents put forth by this article thus far are actually all bunk: They rest on the assertion that people above a certain externally imposed cutoff should not have children because it is not natural and nature is a historically terrible arbiter of personal choice. American states used to legislate against interracial couples on the basis that miscegenation was �unnatural. Some conservatives continue to fight gay marriage and gay parenthood on the grounds that homosexuality is unnatural. Broad-minded people see these critiques for what they are: bias and personal distaste hiding behind an idea of natural law. And yet some of these same broad-minded people still feel comfortable using chronological age to sort the suitable potential parents from the unsuitable. That’s because those judgments, and the backlash they’re fueling, are a product of ageism, the last form of prejudice acceptable in the liberal sphere. Sitting so ostentatiously on the boundary between �youth� and �age,� 50-year-olds threaten an image we hold of good parents (i.e., the handsome, glossy-haired ones depicted in the house-paint ads). By acting young when they’re supposed to be old, they cause discomfort for the people around them. Parents like Kate Garros have felt this all too acutely. �If you don’t meet people’s expectations of what a mother looks like, they can’t hack it,� she told me.

The reason people couch their objections to older parents in concern for the children is to mask their more impolitic uneasiness about the parents themselves. But those objections are hypocritical: The number of grandparents in America who have primary responsibility for children rose 8 percent to 2.6 million people between 2000 and 2008, according to the Pew Research Center. But they are not deemed unfit caregivers simply on the basis of their age�on their ability to throw a ball or stay up late. What’s more, the available science says that for all the disdain directed at older mothers and fathers, their kids are likely to fare just fine. There are, to be sure, myriad ways to inflict grief and suffering on children (including and especially by having them too young), and the heightened dangers of a middle-aged pregnancy demand private risk calculations. But being an old parent, in and of itself, does no harm.

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