"The Seed" by Alexandra Kimball

If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you will know that I proudly identify as a feminist. Growing up in the 1960s & '70s, my peers & I were assured that the sky was the limit when it came to possibilities for our future. When I was in my teens, American feminists rallied (but ultimately failed) to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. While I was in my 20s, women in my own country converged on Ottawa to demand that equal rights be enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that became part of our new constitution in 1982. In 1988, abortion was decriminalized when Canada's Supreme Court overturned the existing law. Abortions here are now safe & legal (although in practice, access remains limited.)

While feminists have long defended the rights of women to access safe and affordable birth control and abortion, there's been a curious blind spot -- a noticeable lack of interest and effort -- when it comes to matters of infertility and pregnancy loss. Some of the early feminists (not without reason) viewed motherhood as a tool of the patriarchy to suppress women's advancement. There's also a strand of feminism that celebrates "earth mothers" and "natural" parenting -- unmedicated home births, etc.  Assisted reproductive technologies, on the other hand, are often viewed as "unnatural" and exploitive of women -- egg donors & surrogates, if not infertility patients themselves.

Finally, someone has dared to ask some hard questions and point out the gaps and discrepancies in existing feminist thought on these subjects. "The Seed: How the Feminist Movement Fails Infertile Women" by Alexandra Kimball is an important addition to these discussions.

(The only other book I can think of that deals with infertility & (more specifically) pregnancy loss through a feminist lens (& which also points out the shortcomings of the feminist movement in this respect) is "Motherhood Lost" by Linda L. Layne (2003), which Kimball references several times. I read it quite a while ago... must dig it out & re-read it again soon...!)

I think I first heard about this book about a month ago, via Jody Day on Twitter. I immediately added it to my "want to read" list. The day it was out (April 10th), dh & I were at a bookstore where ONE copy was supposedly in stock. I painstakingly scanned the shelves (straining my wonky eye!) but never did find it. :p  A day later, an e-pub version popped up as available on the publisher's website. I snapped up a copy, downloaded it to my Kobo e-reader, and started reading. :)

It is a short book, under 150 pages (including notes & bibliography) -- but it packs a lot into them. I blazed through it in under 24 hours time (which included time out for sleep & dh's birthday outing/celebration, among other things).

"The Seed" is partly a memoir: Kimball endured multiple miscarriages and failed rounds of ARTs -- and an increasing sense of isolation from other, more fertile women that will be all-too-familiar to many of us here -- before having a son last year, with the help of an egg donor and a surrogate. (Kimball is Canadian, and the book is full of Canadian references -- much to my delight :)  -- as well as examples from the U.S. and other countries.)  It's partly a historical & cultural study of how infertile women have been portrayed and viewed over the centuries, from ancient mythological figures to characters in modern movies and books/TV shows like "Baby Mama" and "The Handmaid's Tale." It's a review of feminist literature on the subjects of motherhood, infertility and assisted reproductive technologies.  And it's a strong argument that feminism has failed infertile women in some pretty important ways. Shouldn't we support women who desperately want to be mothers, as well as those who are equally adamant that they do NOT want children? Shouldn't "reproductive rights" include access to fertility treatments, as well as birth control and abortion?  

Kimball argues that infertility & pregnancy loss are every bit as much valid forms of "work" as pregnancy/birth and motherhood are (which is, of course, itself often derided and devalued) -- not only the very real work it takes to get & stay pregnant through fertility treatments, but the emotional work of living as an infertile person in a fertile world, where parenthood is viewed as the "norm," taken for granted and comes so easily to so many. Grief is an important part of this work that is all too often ignored or minimized by those who have not experienced it.

Towards the end of the book, Kimball briefly outlines her vision of what an inclusive feminist vision of infertility might look like:

A few weeks after Charlie was born, I found myself going back to my old ivf and surrogacy message boards, wondering what these communities of women could have been like in a different world. If earlier feminists had seen us as sisters rather than patriarchal dupes or oppressors of other women. If infertility lobby groups had embraced an idea of infertility as an issue of medical, emotional, and spiritual health rather than a type of consumer identity. I imagined a feminist movement parallel to the one for abortion access, in which women would call for more research into the causes of infertility, the potential efficacies of various treatments, as well as their risks. We could call for expanded access to proven reproductive health care for all Canadians—not just the rich ones, not just those in cities who are partnered and straight—by demanding it be brought under the auspices of a properly regulated health-care system. We could align ourselves with, rather than against, surrogates and egg donors, lobbying for a system in which policies around third-party reproduction are shaped by them, for their own safety and interests, opening up the possibility of them organizing as workers. We could support infertile women who do not conceive in either finding other forms of family or healing into satisfying lives lived without children. Truly patient-centric clinics could bloom under our watch. Perhaps most importantly, infertile feminists could embrace our status as different kinds of women—as the kinds of women who eat people in folk tales and get thrown down elevators in movies—to challenge the idea that motherhood is unthinking, automatic, and instinctual, and be living examples of how maternity is instead a thing that is both worked at and worked for, sometimes by multiple people and sometimes not by women at all.

I gave this book four (4) stars on Goodreads. The language can be a bit academic at times, and there's so much food for thought here to chew on that it can sometimes be a bit dizzying. :) On balance, it's a really important book, and I am glad Kimball has written it. May there be many more like it to come!

You can read an excerpt from the book in a recent issue of The Walrus ("The Loneliness of Infertility").

The Globe & Mail recently featured an interview with Kimball, as well as a review of the book. Unfortunately, both these pieces are behind a subscriber paywall.

This was book #10 that I have read in 2019 to date, bringing me to 42% of my 2019 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 24 books.  I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 4 books ahead of schedule to meet my goal. :)