Name: The Art of Waiting
Rating: 3 (22 reviews)
Author: Belle Boggs

What’s in it for me? Get a new perspective on what it means to have children.

For many people, having children is their chief purpose and biggest joy in life – some would even say that it’s the meaning of life itself. Regardless of whether you agree or not, parenthood plays a pivotal role in the lives of those who have children, but also in the lives of those who want to have children but are unable to.

Here we’ll look at lesser-known stories of the struggles some people go through to have children and the methods, such as adoption and in vitro fertilization, they employ to become parents even when their anatomy seems to be working against them.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

how one-third of American women will have had an abortion before they turn 45;
why there are so many misunderstandings regarding infertility; and
how adoption might not be a silver bullet to childlessness.

The narratives around birth and pregnancy are contradictory.

Do you remember those awkward sex-ed classes we had to sit through in high school?

Whether we knew it or not, courses like these were meant to teach us about the human anatomy and the privileged place that the concept of birth occupies in our society. In fact, from an early age, most kids are taught to value reproduction and child-rearing; indeed, cultures uphold the belief that children are the center of all life, as evidenced by sayings like “the children are the future.”

Beyond that, the desire for biological children is seamlessly coded into most world religions and art. Just consider the Hebrew Bible, which commands Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, or the Hindu belief that children are gifts and a reflection of karma.

Even the earliest known works of figurative art, produced around 35,000 years ago, feature exaggerated sexual characteristics like wide hips, voluptuous breasts and prominent vulvas. These artworks are thought to depict fertility goddesses.

So, due to millennia of cultural conditioning, most people now assume that their futures should include children. This belief is so ingrained that, during her time as a K-12 teacher, the author found that most of her young students saw themselves as future parents.

However, we’re also taught about contraception and the importance of protection against both sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted births. As a result, 62 percent of American women of childbearing age use some form of birth control and, at current rates, 30 percent of them will have had abortions by their forty-fifth birthdays.

Yet despite this contradiction between the simultaneous promotion of fertility and contraception, humanity has managed to reduce births with great success. We’ve been so successful that, compared to other members of the animal kingdom, humans have relatively few children, at a worldwide average of just 2.5 kids per woman.

These numbers are lower in developed countries and higher in poorer societies – but not in any extraordinary way. In developing nations, women have around four to six children on average, about half of whom die before sexual maturity.

There’s considerable scientific debate about the evolutionary drive behind childbearing.

Why is having kids so appealing to some women? Is this desire socially conditioned or biologically driven?

Well, the cultural importance of this longing is deeply rooted, although different cultures call it by different names. For instance, the English refer to women with this desire as “broody,” a word borrowed from the concept of brooding hens who refuse to rest or roost, instead sitting on their clutch of eggs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, an American woman might focus on the time limit governing this urge by saying that her “biological clock is ticking.”

Infertility often causes deep emotional pain.

The debate around abortion rights garners lots of attention in the United States. But a topic that gets less publicity is the plight of people who want children and can’t have them.

This glossing over is a result of a general misconception about infertility and the pain it can produce. Infertility is often dismissed as a white, upper-middle-class problem, but it actually disproportionately affects minorities, the poor and those with less of an educational background. We also tend to think of infertility as a woman’s problem, when it affects both sexes equally.

Adoption is much more challenging than most people expect.

So, infertility is a widespread issue, but why don’t these people just adopt children who would otherwise have more difficult lives? Well, it’s not that simple.

For starters, the adoption process is exceedingly complex, expensive and uncertain. Cost is one issue, as adoption can often run tens of thousands of dollars, but time is another. Parents wishing to adopt usually wait years for their applications to clear.

Humans, like animals, will go to extreme lengths to have offspring.

Observing animals in the wild makes clear that they’ll do whatever it takes to ensure they reproduce. Just take the male blue-backed manakin bird, who practices his mating dance for some eight or nine years before unveiling it to prospective mates. Or consider the male barn swallow, whose long tail feathers attract more females, but also make him more vulnerable to predators.

And we can’t forget the Pacific salmon, who swims up freshwater streams to spawn, even though the freshwater causes their flesh to decay.

Key ideas in The Art of Waiting