Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey

Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey by Anne Taylor Fleming (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, c. 1994) eloquently discusses some of the most crucial cultural issues Americans confront. A former columnist for The New York Times, an essayist for The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Fleming enjoys a well-deserved reputation for skilled social analysis. In this book she helps us grasp a bit about what it's like to be a woman in our day. Fleming's work weaves together several significant themes: 1) her desperate, late-in-life quest for motherhood; 2) her love/hate relationship with gender feminism; 3) her questions concerning the nature of marriage; and, 4) her unacknowledged hunger for transcendence, something beyond herself which makes life meaningful. She's the daughter of Hollywood actors---her mother co-starred on The Ray Milland Show---who divorced when she was five. She breezed through school, absorbing on the way the sexual mores of the '60's, embracing the new-found freedoms espoused by prominent feminists of that era such as Germaine Greer and Kate Millett. Following a cohabiting period with him, at the age of 22 she married Karl Fleming, a journalist 22 years her senior, to whom she remains married. Determined to succeed as a writer, she did. But vocational success failed to satisfy the hungers of her heart. Motherhood Deferred tells her story. For she believed (and continues to believe I suppose) that she needed a child to make life complete. Her husband brought two step-sons to their marriage, but step-mothering has its built-in, less-than-fulfilling limitations. At 38, Fleming found herself overwhelmed with the desire for con¬ceive a child of her own. In her words, she was: "giddy, hopeful, lonesome, a baby¬less baby boomer now com¬pletely consumed by a long¬ing for a baby, a feeling akin to heartbreak when you can't breathe but for the sensation of loss" (p. 13). Alternating chapters tell the medical details of the assorted treatments she tried in the failing endeavor to get pregnant. These chapters, journal-like in composition, enable us to feel the roller-coaster emotions of hope and despair, of medical promises and failures. Fleming tried everything--GIFT, ZIFT, IUI, ITI, IVF. She had the money, and L.A.'s fertility clinics had the programs, so every route was explored. Whether she was simply too old or just cursed with infertility no one knows. We do know she failed to conceive a child. The ethicist in me has grave reservations about some of the medical techniques employed in Fleming's quest. Discarding fertilized eggs, unneeded for a given procedure, raises serious questions concerning the sanctity of human life. Yet my heart feels compassion for Fleming, so desperately desiring a fundamentally natural good. And with her I discount the worldly wisdom of our gurus and experts who encourage women to place professional success ahead of motherhood. While undergoing various fertility procedures,