Archives: October 2010

Dr. Dorian Paskowitz graduated from Stanford in 1946. He was one of the most respected doctors in his new home of Hawaii and was often sought to run for governorship. When Paskowitz is asked to reflect on this point in his history he says, “It was the lowest time in my life!”

After two failed marriages he traveled to Israel for a year of spiritual reflection and self discovery. He introduced surfing to Gaza. After being rejected from the Israeli military he decided to return to the United States where he found his third and ever-lasting wife, Juliet. Tanned and in superior health from surfing and a strict diet, Dorian stole Juliet’s heart by approaching her in a bar, walking right up to her and saying, “Ma’am, you could very well be the future mother of my 7 sons.” She replied, “Well, my mother had nine.”

Juliet would follow her mother’s foot-steps and give birth to 8 boys and 1 girl by Dorian. But “Doc” had interesting views on money, family, and health. The Paskowitz’s  actively rejected money. “No one should have more than they need.” Doc says. For 25 years they traveled the world, surfing together as a family. The kids were never enrolled in formal education. One of his children later said, “Most parents would say, ‘go to school ’cause its safe, but don’t swim with sharks because sharks are dangerous‘. For us, Doc would say,’Go ahead swim with the sharks but you can’t go to school because that s*** is dangerous.” Doc talks about school as if it is a way for society to steal his children away. “I wanted my kids around me. I wanted my kids surfing with me. And education be damned,” he said.

His grown children are all successful and happy people. They are a mix of rock-stars (literally opening for The Rolling Stones), surf champions, and successful film-makers. They are attractive. They are high energy. They are healthy and wise.

“I didn’t want to be a doctor,” says Dorian. “I wanted to be a good husband and a good father, and thus, a good man.”

One of the complaints the kids had was having to endure the sound of their parents having sex every night in the small quarters of their 24-foot camper van (packed with 11 people). Some of the kids developed strategies of holding their ears and squishing their heads between pillows to avoid the apparently very loud noises from Juliet & Doc’s bunk. When asked about the offensive nature of exposing his children to sex as they grew up Doc responds, “[Sex] is a beautiful, beautiful thing… You want to hear something tragic? Tragedy is not the child that overhears his parents making love. Tragedy is the child that has to look away while its father beats his mother.”

I wish I had had a father like Dorian Paskowitz. A father that loved my mother. A father that pursued character before status. A father that rejected money so he could spend more time with me, even if it meant we had to squeeze into a camper van.

I found a copy of Miss Conception (2008) while browsing my local Korean DVD bootlegger. The movie stars Heather Graham and I’m sorry to report, the only decent bits of the movie are when Ms. Graham is either undressing or jogging. All the other scenes were a waste of time unless you’re studying how not to make a movie, or, in my case, the character and psychology of those who buy anonymous sperm.

I am trying to find more information on Camilla Leslie, the Dublin born screenwriter, but all I know is that she has a son, no partner is listed, and she lives between Ireland, her home, and France, the most conspicuous place to live in the universe.

Georginia (Heather Graham) has a one-dimensional (but very cute) boyfriend named Zac (Tom Ellis). They break up for a forgettable reason- he doesn’t showcase the intense enthusiasm to procreate that she does. This leads to a fight where Georgina cries “What about me?! What about my needs?!” and effectively throws away a 6-year romance.

After breaking up with her near perfect, yet highly imperfectable boyfriend she decides to go to the fertility clinic to check up on her bod. The doctor says (in a bad French accent), “Georgina, you have only one ovum left.” Her early infertility means that she only has 4 days of ovulation before her chances of getting pregnant are over. And she desperately wants a baby. Her friends congregate and come up with a plan to get her pregnant- a different strategy for each of the four nights.

Day 1- Make fake ads saying her apartment is available for sublet for single males only. Her two best friends wait outside of the door and screen all the men before they’re allowed in the apartment. Ugly? Awkward? Out. Dashing? Handsome? Welcome in…  Georgina manages to almost have sex with a potential “renter” even only after thirty seconds of small talk and a couple sips of champagne. “You like Italian food? Me too!” she squeaks in excitement as she disrobes…

Day 2- The funeral. Where’s the best place to take advantage of emotionally distressed single men who may want some comforting. Funerals! Georgina almost nabs a semi-decent looking accountant but when she rushes him back to her apartment he discovers her calendar and current to-do list which reads “Lure stranger home”. He smartly takes this as an opportunity to leave.

Day 3- The nightclub. Georgina teases her hair and cuts her dress short to compete for the attention of a male gigolo. He is brawny and beautiful and when she buys a hotel room for the two of them to awkwardly consummate, he robs her and leaves before any successful insemination.

Day 4- Donor sperm. She express delivers anonymous sperm from the internet. Georgina and Klem exhaust several minutes of film for cheap turkey baster jokes and when the time comes to insert the inseminating utensil, somehow her future children are derailed into being extra icing on the top of a birthday cake. A big birthday blunder by anyone’s standards.

Finally she solicits her closest gay friend to be her sperm donor. But he fails to reach climax under all that pressure and ditches his duty to instead take a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet and work with one of his idols, Elton John.

The stereotypes run rampant.

There are about four false endings and zero dynamic male characters.

Men are studs in Georgina’s world. Her boyfriend is only slightly more eligible as the father of her children than strangers, gigolos, and gay acquaintances, yet when he returns to confess his undying love for her, she yields, accepts his embrace, and like any predictable chick-flick, she gets what she wants: a miracle pregnancy.

Heather Graham is cute and pretty nice. Our screenwriter’s strategy was to manufacture likability with vanilla blandness and uncontroversial, middle-class (un)culture. Perhaps the shallow desperation of picking up random guys to get pregnant at nightclubs stings less because of Heather Graham’s buoyant curls. It’s so much easier to forgive Georgina’s complete disrespect for fatherhood when we sympathize with her visceral desire to experience motherhood.

We need new and better movies on this topic.

Leah Ward Sears, retired chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, a senior fellow here at the Institute, and a blogger for our own FamilyScholars.org, has written a beautiful piece today for CNN.com about her recent trip to Oman through our Center for IjtihadReason.

…Looking back, I was grateful to be halfway across the world from my Atlanta home in Muscat, the capital of the tiny country of Oman, when those e-mails came in. It gave me some time to digest the news that I was among the finalists to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, a man whose distinguished service on the U.S. Supreme Court began when I was in college contemplating a career in law.

I had been nervous when I first arrived in Oman, given that a sultan rules this Arab country where few women hold positions of power. But my audiences couldn’t have been more attentive or gracious. I was there as a retired American judge, giving a series of lectures to students and dignitaries about values inherent in our way of life. I was discussing core values that many of us take for granted and that many of us have worked ceaselessly to achieve — justice, the rule of law, individual freedom, equal rights; values that we are extremely lucky to have in this country…

…I’m more optimistic that one day, a mother in Baghdad might be able to make dinner and feed her children without fear of bombs or night invasions, and that she or her daughter might one day become a voice for justice and that leaders might choose to listen….

…When I went to meet with the Omani minister of cultural and religious affairs, a small man with placid eyes, I was a bit distracted during our meeting. Sensing my internal turbulence regarding the news from the United States, he reminded me that I shouldn’t dwell on what was to come because only God knows of the plans he has for my life. “Remember this,” the minister said. “Insha’Allah.”

The phrase is Arabic for “if it is God’s will.” His words remained with me, weaving through my thoughts as I made my way back to the hotel. Insha’Allah. If it is God’s will. The message is the bedrock of my Christian faith, as well, and long has given me the strength to confront the many courses my life has taken…

…I don’t pretend that one trip by me to Oman will change the world, but it’s one act of many that, when enmeshed, will begin to take hold.

Meaningful exchanges between and among the world’s Muslims and Christians must continue to take place, as it will take a flood of mutual understanding to make the religious soil hospitable to tolerance and inhospitable to terrorism. And the tentative tendrils of peace start with such small actions and, with light and nourishment and diligent care, they will strengthen and take tenacious root…

We Baha’is love that phrase and the belief it expresses too: Insha’Allah.

On this one now, Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture.

Commodities and The Politics of Value, by Arjun Appadurai:

Pg. 34-43

Economic exchange creates value. Value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged. …What creates the link between exchange and value is politics.

In modern capitalist societies, it can safely be said that more things are likely to experience a commodity phase in their own careers, more contexts to become legitimate commodity contexts, and the standards of commodity candidacy to embrace a large part of the world of things than in noncapitalist societies.

[There are four types of commodities]:

• Commodities by destination, that is, objects intended by their producers principally for exchange
• Commodities by metamorphosis, things intended for other uses that are placed into the commodity state.
• A special, sharp case of commodities by metamorphosis are commodities by diversion, objects placed into a commodity state through originally specifically protected from it.
• Ex-commodities, things retrieved, either temporarily or permanently, from the commodity state and placed in some other state.

[Demand] emerges as a function of a variety of social practices and classifications, rather than a mysterious emanation of human needs, a mechanical response to social manipulation (as in one model of the effects of advertising in our own society), or the narrowing down of a universal and voracious desire for objects to whatever happens to be available.

Wherever clothing, food, housing, body decoration, number of wives or slaves, or any other visible act of consumption is subject to external regulation, we can see that demand is subject to social definition and control.

Modern consumers are the victims of the velocity of fashion as surely as primitive consumers are the victims of the stability of sumptuary law. The demand for commodities is critically regulated by this variety of taste-making mechanisms… Demand is a socially regulated and generated impulse, not an artifact of individual whims or needs.

Robert Putnam and David Campbell argue that an sharp increase in young people not identifying with any organized religion is caused, to a significant degree, by young people being repulsed by conservative politics, and in particular by homophobia.

We were initially skeptical about that proposition, because it seemed implausible that people would make choices that might affect their eternal fate based on how they felt about George W. Bush. But the evidence convinced us that many Americans now are sorting themselves out on Sunday morning on the basis of their political views. For example, in our Faith Matters national survey of 3,000 Americans, we observed this sorting process in real time, when we interviewed the same people twice about one year apart.[...]

This backlash was especially forceful among youth coming of age in the 1990s and just forming their views about religion. Some of that generation, to be sure, held deeply conservative moral and political views, and they felt very comfortable in the ranks of increasingly conservative churchgoers. But a majority of the Millennial generation was liberal on most social issues, and above all, on homosexuality. The fraction of twentysomethings who said that homosexual relations were “always” or “almost always” wrong plummeted from about 75% in 1990 to about 40% in 2008. (Ironically, in polling, Millennials are actually more uneasy about abortion than their parents.)

Just as this generation moved to the left on most social issues — above all, homosexuality — many prominent religious leaders moved to the right, using the issue of same-sex marriage to mobilize electoral support for conservative Republicans. In the short run, this tactic worked to increase GOP turnout, but the subsequent backlash undermined sympathy for religion among many young moderates and progressives. Increasingly, young people saw religion as intolerant, hypocritical, judgmental and homophobic. If being religious entailed political conservatism, they concluded, religion was not for them.

Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer of UC Berkeley were among the first to call attention to the ensuing rise in young “nones,” and in our recent book, “American Grace,” we have extended their analysis, showing that the association between religion and politics (and especially religion’s intolerance of homosexuality) was the single strongest factor in this portentous shift.

I don’t know if their analysis is correct, but I certainly hope it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESuc7_CBsnQ&feature=related

“Infertile couples are very easy to exploit,” the doctor says.

Still trying to make sense in my head and weigh the pros and cons. I like it when a poor woman in India can pay off her debts and pay for her children’s education. I feel confident in the love and care the child born will receive when hir birth was so expensive and time consuming.

I don’t like the commodification of babies and women’s bodies. I don’t like a culture that disrespects the wisdom and thoughtfulness put into surrogacy restriction laws at home to bypass them in a remote country to possibly harm remote people. I don’t like couples spending 20 years trying to have children and spending $30-100,000 on fertility treatments when they could pluck a kid or two out of foster-care and really make the world a better place at home.

It makes everyone feel so cozy that Indian women can buy a house and educate their children with their big paycheck, but what about dedicating that energy to a foster kid? Aren’t there vulnerable children at home who need help setting up their life, receiving an education so they too may be able to buy a house and educate their kids? Or are we only helping the poor and vulnerable on the opposite side of the planet now? Here’s a check, now go be good girls and boys and by the way thanks.

Sufjan Stevens has always been a favorite of mine. And this is probably my favorite song of his.

The lyrics have something to do with God. Interpret at your own discretion. I think he captures the parent-child sentiment well, whether you are the parent or the child (of God). It seems I’m only religious when I’m listening to music.

lyrics:

I have called you children, I have called you son.
What is there to answer if I’m the only one?
Morning comes in Paradise, morning comes in light.
Still I must obey, still I must invite.
If there’s anything to say, if there’s anything to do,
If there’s any other way, I’ll do anything for you.

I was dressed embarrassment.
I was dressed in wine.
If you had a part of me, will you take your time?
Even if I come back, even if I die
Is there some idea to replace my life?
Like a father to impress;
Like a mother’s mourning dress,
If you ever make a mess, I’ll do anything for you

I have called you preacher; I have called you son.
If you have a father or if you haven’t one,
I’ll do anything for you. I did everything for you

Karen Clark forwarded this article to me on Susan Jameson’s rejection of her biological son Nigel.

Jameson gave her son up for adoption to pursue her acting career. As he got older he also pursued entertainment and now makes a living as a pianist. “I used to fantasise that my real parents were actors or musicians or artists. Something that would explain me and where I fitted in the world.” Nigel says. “[My adoptive parents] were very strict and they had no time really for the arts or music, which I always loved and was good at. So I made up this version of my life story where my mum and dad were famous actors and one day I’d meet them and it would all make sense. Well I was half right.”

The first rejection followed by the second rejection by his mother has left him with a lingering question, “Why wasn’t I good enough?”.

And, it seems, that kids absorb the dignity of their conception story into the fiber of their being and gauge their own self-worth by the circumstances under which they were first created. Nigel finds out that he was conceived in a regrettable, drunken hook-up. “Finding that out did a world of good for my self-esteem.” he jokes.

He expressed jealousy when, sixteen years after he was born, Jameson gave birth to another unprepared for child. This time, she felt the maternal pull and kept her daughter and has raised her enthusiastically and with love ever since. Jameson said all she wanted was to be with her baby, Lucy.

So what is the difference for some biological parents? Why is one child wanted and loved and others are given away to strangers to raise without a bat of the lashes (as in sperm and egg donation)? For the parent, the desire to raise the child may have a great deal to do with the story of their conception. Would you rather raise a child you conceived via rape or marriage to the love of your life? Would you want anything to do with a kid that contacted you from a regrettable affair you had? What if that estranged child were conceived on one of the most romantic, memorable nights of your life with the-one-that-got-away?

Conception stories matter to parents, and they matter to children. And they all dictate the worth of the child in the parent’s eyes. And those feelings of worth stay with the child for the rest of their lives for many of us.

So when we tell donor-conceived children that they should be thankful to be alive because they are “so loved and so wanted” we must remember that that is only half the story, for half of our parentage. The other half gave us away for a little bit of cash- at best for school supplies/tuition, at worst for beer money or a boob job. Both halves matter.

A couple of days ago an acquaintance familiar with my work asked me what I knew about my father. I know that he was 34 when he donated, lived in the LA basin, was of Polish descent, and was a respiratory doctor. I know his birthday and I know a few of his hobbies. My acquaintance asked me why I haven’t tried to track my father down. Surely there’s only so many people with Polish last names that were practicing pulmonology in 1985 around LA, he asserted.

That made me think. Why haven’t I tried to track him down?

A while back I spoke at a workshop. It was me against the moms, and one woman in the crowd, after listening to me beg them not to have their children this way, asked me, “Well would it have been better if you could have met your dad when you turned 18?” I cringed. “What good is a dad after 18?” I said. That’s like someone giving you a power-drill after you’ve already built 80% of a house with a hand-screw and a hammer. Maybe it would give me a littler closure, but something about tracking him down now while I’m just starting to set up my life seems like a big waste of time.

• What if it takes years to track him down?
• What if I never track him down?
• What life experiences must I sacrifice if I dedicate so much of myself to find him?
• If I do find him, will he reject me?
• If I do find him, will his family reject me?
• If I do find him, will my family reject him?
• Will my family be insulted by my decision to pursue him?

And of course there is the question: What if I meet him and I hate the guy? What if he is shallow and weird and off-putting and I don’t get along with him at all?  Should I spend the youth of my twenties hunting down some M.D. in America’s second largest city just for a coffee date and a “Sorry kid, but I’m not interested in playing dad.”?

Kathleen LaBounty spent years trying to track down her Baylor U. father.

Theresa Erickson was a serial egg donor in her twenties and now has a successful law firm specializing in egg donation and surrogacy. She makes her money making sure social parents never have to feel threatened by their children’s biological parents. “I do not consider any of the offspring created through my donation to be my children and I have no interest in meeting them, ever.” she said at a workshop this summer.

There are a million obstacles to finding our biological parents. And the courts aren’t exactly facilitating these reunions. People are always saying to disgruntled donor offspring “Just live your life! Go to the beach! Have a good time! Life is such a gift!” Never mind all the holes in that blanket solution to our ontological crises, there will always remain an ever present loss, and a list of sacrifices and risks associated with filling that loss.

I think I did it right when I wrote a movie script on the subject. Creating your own fantasy and being able to watch it on the screen seemed to be an appropriate solution to my fears.

But a movie will never replace my father.