Phoebe Kate

“I don’t care too much for money/Money can’t buy me love,” the Beatles sang — ahhh, but it can buy you a baby via a surrogate mother in a Third World country. 

“Good Morning America” had a feature yesterday about cut-rate discounts abroad for couples who are reproductively challenged.  You can pay anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000+ for a solution here, but get the same services for a modest $6,000 in India and American couples are taking advantage of the baby sale.

This obstetrical outsourcing sounds disturbingly like something out of Brave New World and raises troubling philosophical and moral issues.  Hooray for childless couples and kudos on being such smart consumers, but might purchasing your future kid be a Faustian faux pas?  Should we rent the wombs of destitute, desperate Third World women to satisfy our desires at the cheapest price?  Does our pursuit of happiness and personal fulfillment justify turning other human beings into objects for our use? 

It’s easy to evade these unsettling questions by stressing the economic benefits we offer our foreign baby incubators – $6K is a small fortune in India.  But what psychological and spiritual damage do we inflict upon these women by de-personalizing and de-humanizing them?  They already live in a culture that does not hold them in high regard.  What psychological and spiritual damage do we do to ourselves by exploiting the poor and feeling good about it? 

Interesting, isn’t it, that our society views paying women for sex as degrading and demeaning — but just cut out the intercourse part and it’s perfectly all right to pay women to carry our fetuses.  We can contract to use some parts of their bodies but not others.  They are available for hire to meet some of our intimate needs, but not all.  Hmmm…what’s wrong with this picture?

And what about the kids of the infertile couples who opt for this solution?  Will they feel extra-loved and extra-special because Mommy and Daddy went to such extremes to have them?  Or will they feel creeped out by the un-normal circumstances of their conception and birth?  Will they want to find the anonymous woman in India who carried them inside her for nine months, just as adoptees feel compelled to locate their birth mothers?

A couple has recently started the IVF Vacation, a company that offers overseas reproductive packages.  Already this is becoming a new opportunity for clever entrepreneurs — well, we’re nothing if not an enterprising lot here in the good ol’ US of A.  But in this instance, will it really work in our favor?  It may be okay to save money on some things, but not others.  I can foresee the day when IVF surrogacy offspring one-up each other on the playground.  “My parents paid $6,000 to have me,” one little kid brags.  And the other kid says, “Well, my parents paid $100,000 for me.  Your parents are a bunch of cheapskates.  So there, you dumb jerk.”

–phoebe kate       

According to “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” the musical based on the cartoon strip “Peanuts,” the answer to that question is: “Two kinds of ice cream, finding your skate key, telling the time.”

According to Phoebe Kate, it’s having your own personal robot.

“Good Morning, America” today had back-to-back features that seem ironically juxtaposed. 

The first concerned a study by the Wharton School of the U of PA that found that women were not as happy as men.  The survey cited the obvious causes: too many choices and too many responsibilities.  More interesting was why men are happier — because they cut back on activities they find “unpleasant.”

The second segment discussed the amazingly adaptative robots they’re building at MIT.  Currently making test-runs in homes in the Boston area, these remarkable machines can help you keep on your weight loss and exercise plan, perform household chores and other tasks after being given simple directions (the same kind you give your spouse/significant other and your kids, only the humans tend to be rather less reliable and agreeable.)

The truly astonishing thing, however, about our robotic assistants is that they have been programmed to make eye-contact with humans and change expressions.  They have beautiful, huge, expressive Bambi eyes.  They have nice, soft voices and very civilized manners.  They look concerned, sympathetic and — well – interested  in what you’re saying to them.

I think the women of America need these robots more than they need Botox, a day at the spa, a Girls’ Night Out, a shopping spree at the mall and six years of analysis to figure out why they’re so unhappy living in the best country in the world.  These kind-eyed, ever-faithful, friendly mechanized friends will do all those unpleasant tasks we can’t seem to shed as easily as our male counterparts.

They’ll not only do the laundry but put it away, clean in all those hard-to-reach places around the house, scoop the kitty litter box, unload the dishwasher, answer the phone and politely tell our mother-in-law that we can’t chat right now, balance our checkbooks and remember to pay our bills on time, defrag our computers and de-worm our pets and touch up our roots once a month — and make sure a cold, shaken-not-stirred martini is awaiting us when we walk in every evening, as well as a home-cooked, nutritionally balanced meal. And when it asks us if we’ve had a good day and we say no, it will look at us with its large, benign, non-judgmental, non-stressed eyes and inquire, “Do you need a hug?”  

–phoebe kate              

Was glad to hear this morning that Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) Church has been found guilty of being an accomplice to rape.  If you’re not up on this case, you can read about it here.

I became aware of the FLDS, a renegade sect of Mormons who continue to practice polygamy and are a law unto themselves in remote parts of Utah and Arizona, when I reviewed the book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith for Pop Matters.  You can read the review (and some of my thoughts on religion) here.  

I’ve had some personal experience with Christian sects, not the FLDS, but others.  You can hardly be a bona fide Southerner and not have rubbed elbows with snake handlers, faith healers, self-proclaimed prophets, miracle workers and people who profess to have private audiences with God, visited heaven, seen angels and possess extraordinary powers and insights.  They’re very interesting to talk to, believe me.

But listen to the ordinary folk in these church circles and you hear a very different story.  A 13-year-old girl who was raped by her father and bore the child because abortion was forbidden under any circumstances.  A man who refused to get his malignant melanoma treated because he was waiting for God to heal him.  An unmarried 30-ish woman who was publicly denounced by her pastor in a packed-house Sunday morning service as a harlot.  Her crime? She was sleeping with her boyfriend.  A perfectly sane, well-educated woman of 40-something who will look you straight in the eye and tell you, “If my husband put a gun in my hand and told me to go kill a particular person, I’d do it — and just pray God somehow intervenes before I pull the trigger.”

Poor old God.  His friends and supporters do Him so much more harm than all the atheists, secular humanists, scoffers and religion-bashers put together.

–phoebe kate 

Well, Kiefer Sutherland got busted early this morning on a DUI.  This is apparently his 3rd such oopsie with the law on the same set of charges.  He joins a long list of celebrity scofflaws who don’t seem to ‘get it’ — Mel and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole, Bill Murray, Ray Liotta, Mike Tyson, Tracy Morgan, Rip Torn, Haley Joel Osment, “Lost” cast member Michelle Rodriquez who served 60 days in jail, film director Gus Van Sant, David Hasselhoff, Shemar Moore, Ty Pennington, several notable (to some but not to me since I’m not a football fan) NFL players, former Duke All-American Guard J.J. Reddick (whom I know since I am a basketball fan), countless rappers, rock musicians of every era and the CEO of U.S. Airways.

Sheeeeeesh.

What’s the matter with these people?  I really don’t get it.  I understand partying — that’s not what I object to.  What gets me is that even if they don’t have a friend able to be a designated driver, all of them have enough money to pay for a car and a chauffeur to haul their drunken and wasted asses home. 

Why don’t they do it?  Isn’t that what fame and power is all about — to have people do for you what you could, but don’t choose or care to, do for yourself?

Man, if I had the bucks those folks did, I’d be living the life of Driving Miss Daisy at half the age Miss Daisy was and enjoying it twice as much.

–phoebe kate

My father, Michael, was an eccentric.  Not a reclusive-type one, but a colorful one — rather in the style of Oscar Wilde, a writer whose work he greatly admired.  He put a copy of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in my room when I was very young, trusting that at that right moment, I’d pick it up and read it and understand.  A voracious reader of everything I could put my hands on, I gave the book a few passes at 8 and 9 and 10, and couldn’t get beyond the first few pages.  At 12, I read the whole thing and it influenced me greatly as an aspiring writer.

My father was a man of strong faith, but always realistic and frequently flamboyant.  I have the feeling that when he wasn’t thinking he was Oscar Wilde, he fancied himself the psalmist David, who was prone to frequent outbursts of personal consternation and woe.  For several months when I was a teenager, I’d be awakened every morning at 6 A.M. by my father’s loud wail, ”OH MY GOD! I’M STILL HERE!”  It was not a prayer of thanks upon seeing the light of a new day, but a protestion to heaven above.  My mother and I didn’t make much out of it — after all, he was an eccentric, right?  He was just being dramatic, a role he so greatly relished.

Once I asked him why he shouted like that at the crack of every dawn.  He just gazed benignly at me over the rim of his martini glass and said, “One day, my dear girl, you’ll understand.  Life doesn’t get easier as you get older.” 

I just rolled my eyes in the supremely condescending manner that adolescents adopt with enigmatic elders.  Every kid knew that once you got your drivers license, and became the legal age to drink and to marry without your parents’ permission, and had the power to make your own decisions, be the captain of your fate and the master of your destiny, things would be just fine.  

It’s taken me four decades, Michael, but I finally  understand.   

–phoebe kate