Pondering choices: baby acquisition

Right. Future decisions. Let me lay out where we can go from here:

Another IVF at our current clinic.

We know the routine, the costs, and the practical difficulties. We don't know the success rate (due to local recombinations, they didn't have numbers up last year, and I've been afraid to go look up the new ones—I won't until the tenure decision comes through). It hasn't worked yet, and the fertilization results on our second cycle were just not good at all. Probably can't be tried before next summer.

Another IVF at another clinic.

It might work better; we could cherry pick success rates and methodologies. Might not be possible, since they'd have to be willing to use the sperm we have in the freezer; Beaker's not getting cut open again. Might be very geographically inconvenient and far more expensive. Definitely can't be tried before next summer, maybe even longer.

Donor insemination.

Probably more likely to work. Probably cheaper and easier, looking solely at short-term considerations. Certainly could be done at our local clinic, perhaps even at home. Might take a while to work, but might be less stressful anyway. Could probably get going during the spring semester. There's just that little issue of biological paternity...

So: we are just going in circles. The trade-offs, in money, in time, in possible outcomes, are huge. We can't know what would have happened with un-taken options. Statistics are both loudly available and possibly not relevant. Anecdotal information (e.g., an acquaintance who carried healthy triplets to 36 weeks, after her 5th IVF (total) at a second clinic) is confounding.

Schwartz talks about studies on what people remember of the emotions raised by past experiences: generally the extreme point (whether peak or trough) and how they felt at the end. Well, from the IVF cycles, I remember the extreme anxiety of getting the fertilization and progress reports between retrieval and transfer. The news was just never actually good. And I remember the crushing disappointment of getting the bad news.

But am I putting too much weight on those briefly experienced emotions, relative to the long-term happiness we might get from having Beaker's own miracle baby, or the long-term disappointment and/or confusion that a donor child might experience?

But what if long-term happiness just isn't as affected by single events as we think it is—as Schwartz presents convincing data is the case?

What about the possibly higher risk of birth defects for ICSI babies?

Or the risk of ultimate failure that increases as we delay? As 32 goes to 33 and then 34? Ooooh, but that's close to the 35 precipice.

Will Beaker's wonderful family relate differently to a donor child?

And so it spins, spins, spins on out...

Comments

[getupgrrl]

Ah yes, the "but what about / but what if / but then what" cycle. I know it well. Have you started beating your head against the floorboards yet? That's where I always end up.

I was intrigued by your comment that "long-term happiness just isn't as affected by single events as we think it is" - does Schwartz discuss the research on this topic? I'd love to hear more.

[Emma Jane]

I don't know if "discuss" is the right word; "mention" might be better, and I'm of course adding another layer of oversimplification. I think I was conflating a few of his examples: e.g. studies of

---overall life satisfaction of lottery winners no higher than average) and people paralyzed in accidents (less happy than average, but not hugely so), and

---how people predicted they'd feel after tenure decisions, versus how they actually felt 10 years later.

Both of those are footnoted to papers from '98 (Schkade and Kahneman, Psychological Science, Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, and Whatley, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, respectively).

But, what I'm trying (perhaps too hard) to believe is that yes, genetics matters, and what we and any progeny know about where said progeny came from will matter, but that those specific facts won't determine whether we end up being a happy family or not. So, it's all an attempt to cut one of the loops of the cyclic worry.