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Dear Albert Garland,
Greetings! I hope this letter finds you well. I recently read your piece in the Huffington Post, “My Wife is Expecting Twins and I’m Not Happy About It.” In your piece you describe at length your attempts to conceive another child involving passionless sex and in vitro fertilization. $100,000 dollars later, you and your wife received the good news that you would not only be having one child, but twin boys. You then proceed to write of your terror, grief, and guilt. Why? Because you both wanted a girl.
Perhaps prudently, you chose to write under a pseudonym. Perhaps you were thinking of protecting your future sons from the pain of knowing their father considering murdering one of them in the womb (“reduction” is quite the clever euphemism), despite your unanswered prayers for one of them to be conceived with some deformity to justify his killing. Maybe you wanted to save yourself from the intense judgment you would receive from the internet community for appearing so ungrateful.
I’m not here to tell you that you are an evil man. I think you understand that the feelings you have are shameful, hence the pseudonym. Your efforts to stop calling your first son “the free one” and one of your twin boys “the extra one” seems to indicate that you are trying not to feel this way. For that I commend you.
However, your letter comes off as immensely ungrateful and selfish. I know people who have struggled to have just one child and some who can’t conceive at all. How do you think they felt when they read your letter? You offer this brusque line to comfort those praying for one healthy child, “I’m sympathetic to people who can’t get pregnant, or who spend a couple of years trying IVF after IVF. But having kids is a selfish endeavor, and in these cases it’s all very relative and highly personal.”
This is precisely the problem. You think that having children is essentially a “selfish endeavor.” You assume that all couples are having children for their own benefit, like shopping for furniture. Children are just one more thing to add to your perfect suburban life. If you think that, it’s no wonder that you feel terror, anxiety and guilt at having more children than you expected. You think that having children is “relative,” i.e. that the parents are the one’s imparting meaning and significance to the lives for their children.
Even as a young man who has never had a child I can see the error in your thinking. Children are not for you, and the significance and meaning of their lives is not given by you to them. Children are human beings, having infinite worth independent of why you wanted to have them. Having children is not a right, and neither is it a right to have less of them than you have already been given. Siring children is not in any way commensurable to talking matching the curtains with the carpet, buying the latest gadget, or paying off the mortgage on your house. Humans are creatures that have thoughts, feelings, and emotions of incredible depth and understanding. They have made paintings, literature, and music beautiful enough to make one weep. They have made awe-inspiring monuments of architecture and technology. A man today can communicate with nearly anyone in the entire world instantly and travel into space thanks to this ingenuity! Piercing the veil of nature with empirical science, they have harnessed power that could destroy the entire planet many times and conceived of methods that allow for a couple late in life to bear children! And you feel dread and terror because you had one more of these amazing beings than you hoped and neither of them are the sex you desired? Perhaps you should start thinking of yourself as blessed with two beautiful sons, instead of burdened. Disabuse yourself of the notion that you are entitled to pick the sex and number of your children and see them instead as a gift.
I will be praying for you and your family. I’m not sure if you are religious (I wouldn’t be surprised if you aren’t. A human being who elevates his own desires so highly probably has no interest in what God would have him do), but, if you are, please pray for me. I write this not to condemn you, but to open your eyes. If I’m guilty of condemnation please forgive me, a sinner. I sincerely hope you begin to see the sons you’ve been given as a miracle.
Sincerely,
Nathaniel D. Torrey (@nathanieltorrey)
Comment by Sara L. Anderson on May 1, 2013 at 2:55 pm
Well done, Nathaniel!
Comment by Jeff Howe (@jt3544) on May 1, 2013 at 2:59 pm
Good response.
Comment by Sandra K Jenner on May 1, 2013 at 8:31 pm
I think the term “designer kid” applies in this situation. Not two small lives loved for their own sake, but a product ordered by mom and dad, like ordering ceramic tile from Home Depot. Wrong color? No problem, send it back. Did he check about getting an extended warranty? The customer is always right, sir.
God help these two children. Their dad sounds like he fits the classic definition of “cynic” – one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. There are different types of poverty, and emotional poverty is the worst. Pity anyone growing up in such a home, where the ultimate sin is inconvenience. Sometimes kids turn out better than their parents, and let’s hope that happens in this case.
Comment by FrJohannes Jacobse on May 3, 2013 at 8:48 am
Very good editorial. It harnesses the blind spot in the father’s thinking: that one only finds himself in the neighbor. The two commandments given by Christ to love God and neighbor are not moral maxims; they reveal brute fact existential reality that speak to the deepest reaches of each person inwardly and reveal the neighbor as the place where a person finds himself.
If the space of existential awareness that rests deep in our souls is filled only with subjective concerns however (pathological narcissism), then every other person will be perceived as an extension of one’s own needs and desires. That kind of self-centered thinking is one of the great afflictions of our age.
Comment by Justin on May 6, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Reminds me of why marriage is in absolute shambles: you complete me. You make me happy. You make me feel good. You do things for me so I love you. You’re sexually exciting to me. Etc.
We look at other people as mere aspects of ourselves, as if we are the only truly real object in the universe, as if all other things are an elaborate dream which has come into being with our own mind. Thus murder becomes a strange, yet indifferent matter of eliminating a piece of “our” personal world which has grown tiresome.
We are truly a sin-mutilated culture.
Comment by Chris H. Borei on May 6, 2013 at 8:17 pm
I am sorry, Nathaniel.I think this editorial is self-righteous, judgmental and shows a total lack of care or understanding for what this couple is honestly struggling with. They are trying to work through their honest feelings, and you come in and go so far as to say that you wouldn’t be surprised if the man was NOT religious, as if someone who knows and has a relationship with Christ could never struggle with real conflicting emotions over impeding twins. And by the way, he never says he is terrified because they wanted a girl. He specifically said it is because of it being twins and they do not know if they can handle twins.
You seem to think that by adding the little note of apology at the end asking for forgiveness “if” you were judgmental makes it ok to judge people on situations that, of your own admission, you have no real knowledge of.
Christ would have us be loving, helpful and prayerful, NOT judgmental and condemning as you have been in this article.
In closing, please know that I am NOT judging you and your faith or walk with God, but rather this editorial and the attack it makes against a man/couple who are obviously in pain and need of true Christian love and support.
Comment by FrJohannes Jacobse on May 7, 2013 at 1:19 pm
Chris, some guys need to man up and Albert Garland (pseudonym) is one of them. Read the editorial by Leon Kass on “To The Source.” It’s about abortion but the deeper theme touches on exactly the point Torrey (correctly) critiques above.
Comment by gregpaley on May 7, 2013 at 5:12 pm
In response to Chris: this father seems to buy into the modern assumption: being a spouse or parent should not be an inconvenience to me. The divorce laws have made it quite easy to get rid of an inconvenient spouse, and abortion gets rid of an inconvenient child. Sorry, but I just can’t sympathize with this father at all. People we love ARE inconvenient, but we maintain relationships with people because we think they are worth the trouble, that accepting the joys means accepting the irritations too. Given this guy’s tone, I’d suggest he take both kids and let them be adopted by someone who will love BOTH of them, and many people would. He sounds like an immature, selfish slob and probably would make a terrible father anyway.