Lesbian Parents Upset Over Getting Twins

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Mums, count your blessings Miranda Devine Sidney Morning Herald, September 23 2007

THE SPONTANEOUS public outrage over two Melbourne lesbians suing their IVF doctor because they got twins instead of the single baby they had requested has been dismissed by the louche left as "moral panic" from homophobes.
But what really galls people about the case is not so much the two-mother angle but the audacity of these women, and their breathtaking lack of insight about their good fortune.
Having been given everything - increasing societal tolerance of their sexual preference, subsidised medical remedy of their lifestyle-induced infertility and two perfect babies - they proceeded to bellyache and navel gaze for the next three years.
They hired a lawyer who likened the error to amputating the wrong leg and sued the poor doctor, unloading all their emotional baggage - and, wow, is there a lot of it - in court.
The non-birth-mother mother testified last week in the ACT Supreme Court, where the couple are suing Canberra obstetrician Dr Sydney Robert Armellin for more than $400,000 for implanting two embryos instead of one.
"She [the twins' birth mother] always said that she had a big heart filled with love," she said.
"I find that she doesn't have the same ability to love that she used to and the same capacity to, I guess, embrace differences and issues as a couple or as a team."
The twin girls - conceived in 2003 in the Canberra Fertility Centre by in-vitro fertilisation using sperm from an anonymous Danish donor - had changed their relationship, she said.
Their lives as a couple were lost as they became bogged down with the everyday tasks of raising two children.
Ain't motherhood grand.
The 40-year-old birth mother testified too: "The experience of my pregnancy was so far removed from what I had anticipated that I was in relationship counselling, in a great deal of pain, and someone was suggesting that adoption was an option."
While she had enjoyed decorating the nursery, buying a pram was distressing, she said. "It was like the last frontier of acceptance to spend hundreds of dollars on a pram."
Perhaps some people don't understand, when they go shopping for donor sperm, that a baby is not the latest adorable consumer item acquired to invigorate your lifestyle, like a steamer oven or a flat-screen TV. That's what pets are for.
A baby is not a new range of retail opportunities - the Peg Perego pram, the Armani Junior layette, the Steiner school. A baby does not exist to give its parents a fresh identity or to pep up their relationship.
Parenthood is not about the parents but the child and, if you don't know it when you are pregnant, the truth dawns soon enough. That is, unless you fight reality every inch of the way, clinging, like these women have, to the fantasy that your life will be exactly as it was before, your relationship with your partner unaltered, as if the baby were not its own person, with its own needs, desires and emotions.
The couple issued a handwritten media statement last week saying they "cherished" both their daughters and the case was not about money but "principle".
They must have fought hard to nurture their sense of grievance for so long, in the cause of "pursuing our convictions".
One of the little-acknowledged advantages of having a father and a mother involved in the tricky start-up of a family is that there are few men who would indulge the sort of neurotic self-pity these women appear to have been wallowing in for three years. And few women would persist with such behaviour under the dumbfounded incomprehension or withering scorn of a husband.
Less feminine empathy and more male pragmatism can be a circuit-breaker to hormone-drenched hysteria. It's a metaphorical slap in the face.
What the women really needed was not $400,000 but someone to tell them to snap out of it and be thankful for what they have - two healthy baby girls. Then they should have sent Dr Armellin flowers instead of a writ.

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