Reason and Chance

“Every living thing is born without reason and dies by chance.”- Sartre

I have this written on a piece of paper. Its been with me for a long time and gives me a sense of the order of life, of nature, of why shit happens. No reason and by chance. It helps somehow.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the grief that others must feel. It aches in my inner core. As a mother I often feel strangely connected through this vulnerable emotion. Sadly I can imagine all too easily how the mother of a missing child feels. It overwhelms me, its something to do with being a human, being a mother, being a woman, believing in your inner self, or intuition and feeling alone. That connection is powerful, its strong helpful, yet frightening. I feel only sadness like this. I am yet to experience the opposite and hope that wont elude me all my life.

However I am totally unsure of how being born without reason and dying by chance is fitting with me when I consider my own children, it doesn’t help me at all. This is because there was a real reason, and they didn’t get any choice in the matter. Not in the natural way of becoming alive and born. This is because they are IVF children, born through science and the desperateness of an infertile couple.

The core of who they are was mechanically put together, the egg chosen and the sperm collected. The reason they are here is because they were made in a lab, manufactured. Of course you cant tell, nor would you ever be able to guess. But in the course of nature is it ok? Have we messed about with the reason and chance of mother nature?

It was hard to face the infertility problem. I was desperate to fall pregnant naturally. It was really hard to admit that I needed help and wasn’t a perfect, functioning woman. That hurt, that was hard. Once we accepted how unlikely it was that we would not fall pregnant by the conventional method it wasn’t hard to go with IVF. Not for any ethical reason.

On the IVF journey we were proactively doing something to solve the problem and that felt like a step ahead, rather than doing nothing and staying in the same place. Don’t get me wrong, the IVF journey was gruesome, a rollercoaster of expectation and failure. There were such limiting odds against you all the time. You became a body to be controlled with only certain odds of success. Timings, injections, blood tests. Science controlling your human cycle you become an unnatural egg manufacturing plant. The number of how many eggs you can make at once becomes the goal, then how many become fertilised, how many grow into 5 day old blastocysts. How many will you implant back in and then how many will you have to freeze for your next try.

Waiting out the 10 days till your pregnancy test is horrific. I used to comfort myself by acknowledging that each second was getting me closer to knowing. Any symptom or sign of pregnancy or possible period was noted. Was that twinge period pain coming on? or does that nausea mean I’m pregnant? What does a pimple mean? Any book containing a list of the first signs of pregnancy is read, reread and then reread again. Mothers are questioned, when did you know? What did you notice first?

At this time you are on a 'Y' shaped road there are only two outcomes, pregnant or not, each offers such different paths, complete happiness and joy, hope expectation and the door opening to the next chapter of your life, or the same continuing struggle of failure and unhappiness.

The IVF process exposes the natural process that we usually don’t know about, the minute day by day detail of what is happening in the reproducing human at every step. There is still no reason that they can explain as to why it doesn’t work and it is a game of chance.

So with two perfect children of course I count my blessings. I am lucky it has worked twice for me. But the words that have given me comfort about life just don’t fit my own children. Because there was a reason they are here now born, alive, breathing. It is because they were chosen, an embryologist picked them. They have two frozen siblings in limbo unpicked. Not growing, life halted yet not dead, no chance.

The big question is, What do we do with them?

These are our choices:
1- Use them and potentially have two more children
2- Let them be used for research
3- Defrost them allowing their development to cease

What would you do?

SPECIAL NOTE: Thank you R for finding out about the origins of the quote for me. Human existence as such is equally meaningless. "It is absurd that we were born, it is absurd that we die" writes Sartre in Being and Nothingness. We do not know where we came from, why we are here, what we must do; or where we are going. "Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of the weakness of inertia and dies by chance" says one of Sartre's characters in Nausea.

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