EMBRYO CULTURE: MAKING BABIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYBeth Kohl
Kohl, a Winnetka-based freelance writer, was frustrated by what she found when she began looking for info on IVF. “I wish I’d had a regular person’s voice in my head,” she says. “There’s a certain fertility-speak and I found it off-putting.” These days there’s an abundance of blogs and chat rooms devoted to IVF, but some women who frequent them also use a kind of insider language; Kohl says they call their frozen embryos “embies,” give them nicknames like “Frosty,” and generally anthropomorphize them.
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Kohl still takes her own daughters to temple to give them a sense of their roots and culture. During a recent reading and Q and A in her hometown, Kohl’s brother, who was there with her mom, raised his hand and asked, “Do you no longer believe in God?” Kohl says now, “I’d be much more comfortable answering that question in front of the pope, but in front of my mom—I don’t want her to think she failed.” She hemmed and hawed and eventually said she wasn’t sure but that she thought it was healthy to question everything. (Her mom was OK with that.)
A year ago Kohl decided to undergo another round of IVF. She had already started the hormone therapy necessary for the process when her editor called to say it would be terrible timing to have a newborn when the book was published. Kohl temporarily scrapped the idea. Since then her husband has decided he doesn’t want a fourth child and thinks they should donate their seven leftover embryos to science. Kohl, who’s theoretically in favor of stem cell research, is struggling with the idea of donating her potential offspring, “whose destiny I feel compelled and duty bound to fulfill.” For now, her embryos remain frozen.v
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