Scary. Like aliens. That is how Kerry Mastera remembers her twins, Max and Wes, in the traumatic days after they were born nine weeks early. Machines forced air into the infants’ lungs, pushing their tiny chests up and down in artificial heaves. Tubes delivered nourishment. They were so small her husband’s wedding band fit around an entire baby foot.
Having a family had been an elusive goal for Jeff and Kerry Mastera, a blur of more than two years, dozens of doctor visits and four tries with a procedure called intrauterine insemination, all failures. In one year, the Masteras spent 23 percent of their income on fertility treatments.
The couple had nearly given up, but last year they decided to try once more, this time through in-vitro fertilization. Pregnancy quickly followed, as did the Mastera boys, who arrived at the Swedish Medical Center in Denver on Feb. 16 at 3 pounds, 1 ounce apiece. Kept alive in a neonatal intensive care unit, Max remained in the hospital 43 days; Wes came home in 51.
By the time it was over, medical bills for the boys exceeded $1.2 million.
I’d like to hear more about what traditional teaching re: birth control has to say about this side of the birth control coin. I really don’t see the difference between a couple’s unnatural efforts to prevent pregnancy vs. a couple’s unnatural (and excessive) efforts to produce a pregnancy. I’ve always assumed the traditional view cuts both ways. That is, married people should be open to the “consequences of love”. Forcing God to give you children seems little different than telling God you won’t be having any.
#1, another way to ask that question is, what is the range of religions’ teachings in America on the importance of children – and in Jewish life, culture and religion, children are a blessing from the Lord with the implicit corollary that the lack of them indicates disfavor from the Lord. This has inspired a lot of efforts toward ‘artificial’ fertility, I think.
I have no personal experience of that situation, though, as I do have of the experience of pre-term delivery and its implications. Our son was a ‘singleton’ pregnancy, but delivered at 28 weeks he spent 10 weeks further in the NICU, and this puts parents in constant elbow-jostling contact with many situations like that described in the article. It has been a looming problem for more than 30 years, and now is one in conjunction with the public health insurance ‘mandate’ being fought over, since increasingly, costs of keeping tiny babies alive and treating all their maladies will fall on public insurance. The distress of huge and mounting costs can even cause parents of premature babies to separate before the neo-nate(s) leave the hospital – we saw one such development 19 years ago. Thankfully we saw many more situations in which the parents drew closer together and the communities around them got involved.
Frankly, I don’t see any clear-cut answers to many of the issues raised here, only ongoing moral/ethical dilemmas, and the need for great courage and tenacity on the part of parents, their larger families, and the spiritual advisers involved as well as the doctors. Perhaps it’s an important aspect of CPE training now, I don’t know. America mustn’t lose sight of the fact that defenseless unborn babies and the tiny neonates some become are all equally precious in God’s eyes, once brought into existence.
#1 sandiegoanglicans.com says:
I’m curious to hear where you would draw the boundary of things that humans do that are “forcing God” to do something. Is taking antibiotics forcing God to make you well? If not, in what way is it materially different from in vitro fertilization?