In Our World, It Takes a Test Tube

The absolute, the paramount, the unfettered American freedom--the right to reproduce, as often as you wish, for as long as you can--has been argued in the court of public opinion. The jury fell asleep.

What’s to stay awake for? The age of techno-miracles is upon us, and the land of techno-miracles is right under our feet. Doctors stitch a healthy baby baboon’s heart into a dying baby human’s chest. Neuroscientists transplant a quail’s brain parts into a chicken’s cranium and the chicken sings like a quail. Reshaped Silly Putty bodies defy time, and weightless bodies stroll the upper atmosphere to defy gravity.

What, then, is remarkable about the San Bernardino County woman who gave birth at a world-record 63 years old, except as one more bravura performance by the lab-coat crowd?

It seems it doesn’t take a village. It takes a test tube.

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A great chemist and a creator of the birth control pill once told me impishly that ideal contraception would require every 15-year-old boy to make copious sperm deposits in fail-safe sperm banks, and then get a vasectomy.

Quite an idea, but we both knew that no free society would tolerate it. Still, the same free society bewails its own impotence about crack-addict babies born to crack-addict mothers, abused children who grow up to beget and abuse children of their own.

In 1991, a Visalia judge made far bigger headlines than “New Mom, 63,” when a woman who had repeatedly beaten two of her four children and was pregnant with a fifth got probation by agreeing to use Norplant, the under-the-skin contraceptive that lasts up to five years. After some antiabortion case fired his .357 magnum at the judge, he removed himself from the case before someone else tried to remove him.

Ten thousand years ago, eyesight as bad as mine didn’t get corrected by eyeglasses. It got corrected, permanently, by stumbling off a cliff or stepping on a viper that someone with better vision would have seen.

The reproductive gene pool game back then had a one-strike rule: If you were too sickly or too old--too bad.

The brain came to our defense. Where the porcupine has spines, the skunk has spray, insects and mammals have camouflage, we have our devices--antibiotics, raincoats, contact lenses, storm windows.

And now even the hands on that notorious biological clock have been turned back, so that “New Mom, 63,” who lied about her age and spent $50,000 on the best fertility treatment money can buy, could have an embryo created by her husband’s sperm and another woman’s egg implanted inside her until it became a baby.

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Most comments about this petri-dish remake of an Old Testament miracle noted the ancient hypocrisy that men of more years than judgment have always earned virility points for begetting babies. (Canada’s Pierre Trudeau fathered one out of wedlock at 71. A 77-year-old actor warmed up tabloid readers a week before “New Mom, 63,” with news of his own new baby.)

“New Mom, 63” handed biotechnology its latest triumph in a whole culture’s bias against its elderly. The old are not sought out for their wisdom or experience; when grandma gets going on her reminiscences, the junior generation often gets up and goes. Why be old when there’s no payoff in it? Buy hair plugs, get a new wife, take hormones, have a baby. Be young.

(Exhibit A: Tipped that “New Mom, 63,” might be at Ontario Airport, my colleague Tom Gorman approached an older woman holding a baby. She was both annoyed that he thought she might look 63, and flattered that she might be mistaken for her granddaughter’s mother.)

What do we call these children--trophy babies? And what is a child, anyway? A gift? A right? An accessory? A biological imperative?

“New Mom, 63,” told a London tabloid, “I wasn’t trying to make history. I just wanted a baby.”

If it was just “a baby” she wanted, she had her choice of the overflowing nurseries of the world--infant girls in one-child, boy-crazy China, babies abandoned in the old Soviet Bloc.

No, the longing, the in vitro ordeal, isn’t just about a baby, but my baby, that bit of me.

Twenty years ago, Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins wrote persuasively that the most powerful motive force on the planet is not ego or sex, not kinship, not food or power, but the tyrannical unit of biology that energizes them all: the selfish gene, whose manifest destiny is to preserve and copy and spread itself as far afield and as far ahead as possible.

As the map is not the territory, the gene doesn’t have to be our compass. As the jungle philosopher played by Katharine Hepburn in “The African Queen” tells her id-ridden companion, “Nature, Mister Allnut, is what we are put into this world to rise above.”