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When my son’s nose runs, which is often, him being small, I sometimes think about the genetic tests my wife and I took. It’s a stage in the IVF process; or at least, it was a stage in ours. A company draws your blood and looks at your DNA and your partner’s DNA and how that DNA might combine and then they tell you: your child is at risk for a lifelong iron deficiency. Or: your child is at risk of not being born at all.
Generally what the company is looking for is bad matches between genes in such a way that might heighten the risk of your kid developing a condition, like cystic fibrosis, that would make life hard on them. With IVF, eggs are fertilized outside the body and so they are right there in a petri dish, available for examination. And science has given us the ability to build a tool, a custom test to examine those fertilized embryos — assuming you’re lucky enough to get that far; many, if not most, eggs don’t fertilize — and screen them for their relative health or lack thereof.
My wife and I, we never had a tool built. We weren’t at risk, in the end, for anything terrifying. But I still remember the genetic counselor on the phone explaining one of the more infelicitous ways our stuff might combine: your hypothetical child might have more trouble than other kids, he said, getting rid of a cold. At the time, we were like, That’s it? Sign us up. I still feel that way. But now here my boy is, with his nose running.
Then again, who has a kid without a runny nose? Sometimes you’ll see journalists or Silicon Valley types talk about how IVF is the future because it gives you the ability to select for all sorts of traits. Male or female — plenty of couples do that now. There is the aforementioned cystic fibrosis check. Someone whose mother is a breast cancer survivor, like mine, might want to screen their embryos for mutations in the BRCA genes. But then there is what is just around the corner, say the people who love to talk about what’s around the corner. Another realm of choice. Genes for height. Genes for eye color or hair color. Genes for IQ. Optimized genes for optimized babies. The idea I guess — beyond the gross eugenic implications — is total control.
You know what’s fucking funny, in the context of raising kids, or the pursuit of kids, which is one of the most fragile and contingent pursuits you could ever embark upon? The idea of control. Control is a star in a solar system so dim and unknown it doesn’t even have a name.
In vitro fertilization is a relatively simple process: retrieve eggs from ovaries using a needle-like suction device; combine eggs and sperm in a petri dish; wait to see how many fertilize, and of those, how many turn into blastocysts, or viable embryos; and then, either immediately or more commonly, after freezing and unfreezing, transfer the blastocyst into the womb, where it will hopefully grow. It’s an odds game, a waiting game: not every egg fertilizes, and not every fertilized egg reaches the blastocyst stage, and not every blastocyst results in a successful transfer. (This is why patients and doctors generally try to generate as many fertilized eggs as possible, more than they intend to use sometimes, a practice that the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling puts under direct threat.) For those undergoing IVF, the process is universal; if and where you snag, and on what — that part is deeply individual.
In fact, it took a long time for me to figure out how to even write this piece, because it’s not really mine to write. The experience of IVF for the person who isn’t actually doing it is hardly a firsthand experience at all. It is your partner whose cycles are closely observed; who is jabbed in the abdomen every night with a needle (depending on the relationship, you may have the privilege of jabbing) that delivers mood and body-altering drugs; who is put under sedation while their eggs are retrieved from their ovaries via a pointy wand. During COVID, I did many of our appointments from the car outside our doctor’s office, via speakerphone — not even in the building. Strictly speaking, my only real job was to walk into the office on the day the eggs were retrieved and jerk off into a cup.
So I want to be respectful of my wife’s privacy and of her story, which she would never choose to share in a magazine. (In fact, here is the only time I will quote her: “I never want to talk about it again. If you could put that in the piece, I’d appreciate it.”) Happy to tell you about the cups though. The first one I encountered was on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on United States soil. We had been trying to conceive for a while, without success. A friend told me: maybe you should get yourself checked out. When I called to schedule the appointment, the receptionist had asked me to “abstain” for two to five days; she didn’t say from what, but I got the idea. The soonest she could get me in, she’d said on the phone, was September 11. Would that be okay?
This was how I found myself on the westside of Los Angeles in a closet-sized room with a sordid little sink and a lounge chair I was uninterested in sitting on or even looking at. I was sweating, writing the date 9/11 over and over again: on the form, multiple times. On the cup itself: my name, and 9/11. Up the elevator, down the elevator, back into the dim parking lot trying to find my car, 9/11.
Some time later, in a fertility doctor’s office, we were told my sperm count wasn’t the problem. My sperm was so robust, in fact, that the doctor asked to keep the printout of the lab report so that she could frame it. Or maybe that was just a nervous joke I made, not her, and I’m remembering it wrong. It all got foggy after a while.
My wife’s middle name is Knox, as is her father’s, and so we always thought if we had a boy, that’s what we’d name him. I thought: girl too. Why not? One thing about IVF is what it does to the very human pursuit of a family: it turns it into science, into numbers, into probabilities, your next scheduled appointment, the one after that. Doctors train themselves to speculate only as far as the next test result. You are chained, constantly, to the uncertain present. My wife often observed that she was being poked and injected and examined to the exasperating point that she could no longer remember what for. But I had no trouble imagining what our baby would be like, if we could just find a way to him or her. Knox was in my peripheral vision at dinner, sitting patiently at the table. Knox was in the backseat of the car, just out of sight. I’d be on the couch, napping; Knox would wake me up, then fade back into whatever realm he or she had come from before I opened my eyes.
IVF is expensive (an understatement), inconvenient (also an understatement), and has the effect of reducing both you and your partner to lab rats, basically (possibly an overstatement, but you try it and see if you feel any differently). So I spent a lot of time thinking about, well: why? My answers, when I really looked at them, were barely answers at all. I wanted a mirror, a reflection of myself. (Why?) I wanted somewhere for the excess energy that seemed to spill over the edges of my otherwise pleasant, tranquil life to go. (Why?) I wanted a little guy to amuse me. (Why?) I wanted my wife to have what she wanted.
The interesting thing about my son —one of many things I find interesting about my son — is that in the end, I have no more insight into what we were up to trying to conceive him now than I did then. He and I were calling to each other across a great distance, a distance that I was daily aware might never close. But when he arrived, he was the answer to another riddle entirely. He didn’t exist for me or my partner. He was — he is — himself. On his own mission, which I observe with great amusement and pride every day, despite not knowing what the mission is.
Once, on assignment for this magazine, I contrived to make the rapper 50 Cent into my life coach. He asked me and my now-but-not-yet-then wife to make vision boards representing how we pictured our future together. We took the exercise as seriously as we could manage. I put, like, a table I aspired to buy on there. She selected a chateau in the south of France, a champagne tower. Somewhere in there was a picture of a baby. Did she want to get married? I wasn’t sure. (I proposed anyway.) But kids: that felt like a certainty.
I don’t think it occurred to either of us that kids are never a certainty. I am from the generation whose sexual education was wrapped up entirely in the AIDS crisis. The panic-filled messaging to those of us born in the early ‘80s was as simple as it was reductive: if you have unprotected sex, you’re probably going to die. And if you’re lucky enough to live, well, congrats on being a teenage father.
My own father is a doctor, so another thing I grew up with was an inviolable faith in the ability of medical professionals to do whatever you might need or want them to do. This of course was naive. You know what a common diagnosis is, for couples in our situation? “Unexplained infertility.” Unexplained fertility is just a wordier way of rendering the shrugging guy emoji on your phone. There is a mystery into which your desire for kids disappears and the doctor has to go in like Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar and try to transmit the answer back to you across space and time. Sometimes the message is received. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the message isn’t even sent. That big wave from the planet covered in water just takes everyone out.
At some point in our process, we had a transfer that didn’t take. My wife and I were talking about this last week, in the wake of the cruel Alabama ruling. It was hard news to receive: we had hoped that this fertilized embryo, which represented several painful and expensive steps in and of itself, would grow and become a child. It did not. Were we supposed to have a funeral? I mourned the kid we didn’t have. But that embryo was not a kid, despite how much we wished otherwise.
After one of the many procedures my wife endured, she woke up from general anesthesia and gave what I can only describe as an acceptance speech. She thanked the nurses, the doctors, the anesthesiologist, none of them by their correct names; her tone was that of a starlet, coyly brushing off an honor she knew she deserved. Then she demanded that the hospital give me a pair of the same socks they’d given her, because they were so comfortable.
There is a world you’re familiar with, of everyday life, and then there is another world you wander into with your partner in search of a child, with its own rules and rooms you share with no one but each other. What you find, talking to other people who have done this, is that while the IVF procedures are relatively standardized, the individual experience of them tends to vary wildly. Both medically and emotionally. Some friends of mine got to the point where they couldn’t even be around kids while they were trying, it was too painful. Other friends sought out all the kids they could find. The only thing we have in common, in the end, is the process; how we react to it will forever be our own. And it is the loneliest feeling, not knowing if you’re going to be joined by someone else.
If I were to give my own acceptance speech, it would probably be to the acupuncturist we both started seeing, a formidably capable and charming woman who wore a face shield and a sweatshirt with the word FAUCI on it, stylized in the Gucci font. This was in our darkest hours. I’d come in and some of the needles would go in my forehead, or my wrist; others were baldly literal, a little porcupine ridge on the north side of my abdomen. I’d lay on her table and listen to whatever pan flute music she had going and think about time passing, the years of my life my kid — should my kid ever arrive — would never see.
Anyway I think this woman saved us. She was like a therapist and a marriage counselor rolled into one cheerful assassin. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years now, and I still think about her regularly. We required help and she simply gave it. It was pre-vaccine COVID, we never even saw each other’s faces because of the masks we wore. There is a generosity in some people that you never fully appreciate until you need it and they arrive, right on time.
During our IVF years, I was sometimes reminded of another story I did for this magazine, about something called the Frozen Zoo in San Diego. The Frozen Zoo is a lab in which the cells, and sometimes sperm and eggs, of endangered and extinct species are held in icy tanks of liquid nitrogen. The idea is that some day, when the technology arrives, we will have a Noah’s Ark waiting for us — everything that we’ve made disappear will be right there for us to bring back.
(Even beyond the science, there are difficulties with this plan. If you destroy an animal’s habitat, and then the animal itself, and then you bring that animal back, some years later, where will the animal live? What will the animal eat? But the scientists at the Frozen Zoo persist.)
One animal they are particularly focused on is the northern white rhino. There are only two remaining, both female, both in a wildlife preserve in Kenya. The northern white rhino is thus functionally extinct — you can go and see them, and I have, but what you are looking at is a ghost. It’s a living animal whose species has already been extinguished. But also: it’s a living animal. The two of them are there on the plains north of Nairobi, trembling on the precipice of being there and being not there.
This is called the extinction vortex. “The notion,” Oliver Ryder, who runs the Frozen Zoo, told me then, “that we have that a population can be doomed but there's still numbers of them around. The numbers get smaller and it becomes a feedback loop. Like water going down a drain: It's deterministic. Or a mass entering a black hole. Once you hit the event horizon, you're out of here.”
The scientists at the Frozen Zoo are part of an international coalition who have turned to IVF as a way to revive the northern white. They have sperm from now dead male northern whites, and eggs from female northern whites, and they are trying to combine them to create fertilized embryos that will then be implanted in a southern white rhino, which is a similar creature. (Recently, they seem to have done just that.) In this way what is dead may live again.
The men and women who do this work hate when you bring up Jurassic Park or use words like “resurrection,” because they are not actual miracle workers. But they are, in my opinion, miracle adjacent. There is this potential in the ether, where a living thing might eventually appear, and these scientists devote their whole lives to pulling it out. They can sense it, they believe in it, but until they do it, it’s just an idea.
During our IVF years, I would think about the extinction vortex a lot: this idea that something could be present and absent at the same time. I’d picture shadows, babies waiting to be born or not born, crowding the plain between here and not here.
The other day, friends of ours who hadn’t yet met Knox recognized him while he was at a music class they were also attending. The reason they were able to identify him? He loves the drums. He’s such an enthusiastic player of bongos or anything with a taut, loud surface that word had reached them and then here this little maniac was in front of them, drumming with all his might. Who else could it be?
Before my son was born I had firm notions about nature versus nurture. Everyone I know is still reeling to this day from whatever their parents did to them, good and bad. And so I figured: it’s all nurture. Then my kid came bloody into the world and started banging on stuff and I changed my mind. Whatever made him who he was didn’t come from us.
He loves dogs and smiles at strangers. When he sees something high in the air, like a kite, or a powerline, he starts yelling at it in an effort to communicate. If you are careless enough to leave an orange in his vicinity, he’ll bite right through the skin and chew on it while making a bewildered face. He is powered by a joy and an optimism that I cannot relate to but regard as my job to protect at all costs. I look at him and think about how there was this force out there somewhere called Knox who maybe would deign to show up, maybe not. We lived in that in-between for a long time. Anything could have happened. Anything still might. I’m just happy he made it to the other side.
Zach Baron is GQ’s senior special projects editor.