Breaking the Secret (Now with more sperm!)

I called Meg today in the morning. “Did you tell her yet?”
A long pause. “No.”
“I can’t keep this secret in me much longer!”
“Uh-huh. We’re about to get our nails done.”
I continued, even that I knew that she couldn’t say anything on her end. “I want to tell everyone.”
“Yeah, well….” She was clearly getting annoyed at me.
 
She called me a few hours later. “I’m back home now… you know I was with my mom, right?”
“Yeah,” I said sheepishly.
“And she could probably hear you from my phone.”
“Oh.”
“She’s probably wondering whether we’re pregnant. Oh, by the way, we’re invited for dinner tonight.”
“Great! Maybe we can tell them?”
“Okay, let’s tell them.”
 
So while Meg’s mom prepared chicken noodle soup, Meg’s dad was talking about trick-or-treaters at the door.
“Speaking of cute kids,” Meg piped in, “I’m pregnant!”
“You’re what?!” asked Meg’s mom, turning around with a spoon in her hand.
“That’s great!” Meg’s dad said, extending his hand and shaking mine.
Meg’s mom raised her hands in the air and squealed just a little and hugged Meg.
 
“We’re not sure how to tell Ryan and Kat,” I said. “We feel a little guilty,” I explained. “But having a baby is good thing.”
Meg’s dad is going to go golfing with him tomorrow. “You should wear a ‘World’s Best Grandfather’ hat,” Meg said. “But still, they’ve been trying for longer than we have.”
“Ryan needs to wear looser pants,” Meg’s mom said.
We laughed. Meg’s brother Ryan has a low sperm count, and his wife Kat has some medical condition that makes it difficult to conceive.
“Like wear track pants?”
“And nothing else,” Meg’s mom said. “Around the house,” she added.
Meg laughed and was a little grossed out, simultaneously.
“Ryan’s still undecided about in-vitro fertilization. He feels that he would be choosing who lives and who dies, you know.”
“Oh, he believes that?” I asked. I knew Ryan was raised Catholic, and that he occasionally goes to mass, but I didn’t know he believed any of it.
“I know some people don’t believe that,” Meg’s mom said.
I nodded.
“Some people would say that your baby isn’t really a baby.”
I nodded. “It isn’t—it’s a fetus.” I patted Meg’s belly. “A fetus that’s going to be our baby.”
“I think it’s about whether you’re ready to have a baby,” Meg said. “It’s a baby if you’re ready for it.”
 
So this got me thinking about pregnancy—sperm, eggs, fetuses, babies, children, human life. I think I mentioned that the other night I watched The Great Sperm Race on YouTube. It was funny, but I also learned a few things about the difficult journey a typical load of sperm ejaculated into the vagina have to go through to get to the egg. About one sperm out of 150 million make it to the egg, which says a lot for the sperm that made every one of us.
Another thing that I marveled at while watching the movie, is that sperm are remarkably alive. A sperm isn’t human—it’s like a little creature who is half of a potential human. A head and a wiggly tail. A haploid made of 23 chromosomes. It’s certainly alive in some sense, struggling and hoping to beat the odds and fertilize an egg.
 
Before the microscope was invented, theories abounded about what sperm did exactly. Augustine said that sin was carried around in sperm since the Original Sin of Adam.
During the early days of the microscope, people insisted that sperm were tiny, tiny people. If you looked hard enough, you can see the head, arms, and legs.
The Tenakh (Genesis 38:7-10) made a weird mention of both having to marry your brother’s widow and that it’s wrong to spill seed upon the ground:
7 And Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord slew him.
8 And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother.
9 And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.
10 And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also.

One would think this is more a testament to the God of the Bible being a homicidal maniac than a justification for masturbation being sinful. What did Er do anyway? And why would Onan marry his brother’s widow and then have doubts about impregnating her? Also, how exactly would Onan impregnate a woman without the seed not being his? That doesn’t make any sense.
Meg likes to point out that, when she was younger, she felt guilty about masturbating until she realized that there wasn’t anything in the Bible that said women couldn’t masturbate.
Anyway, to say, “Life begins at conception” shows a determined lack of understanding about the human productive system. To say “When an egg is penetrated by a sperm, the resulting blastocyst is a person” shows how little they know about the whole process. The sperm was alive before it got to the egg. The egg was alive before the 150 million sperm tried to get to it. The vagina commits genocide every time it has unprotected sex. The fetus isn’t a person. It’s just a kinetic person. It’s going to be a person. And I’m so damned excited about that.