21
What did my mother know? What did my father know? And again: What did my mother know? What did my father know? In yogic philosophy the concept of samskara—the Sanskrit translates into scar or pattern—is understood as a karmic inheritance, a blueprint we’re born with and cycle through again and again over the course of our lives. As Michael and I made our way down the West Coast, the wheel spun around and around, each time catching in the same exact notch—the place of a thousand questions that really all could be reduced to the same two questions. All the while, I scribbled on index cards:
Dystopia.
Feeling (then) as if I were under glass. Feeling that way again now.
Speech from Richard III about nail in horseshoe.
Friends in Malibu were hosting a July Fourth party. We watched fireworks on the beach. The widow of Dino De Laurentiis had a new boyfriend, a retired pilot who was part of a recreational squadron. They buzzed overhead—eight small jets in formation against the purple California dusk. I composed a long, careful letter back to Benjamin Walden explaining the maze of facts that snapped together as if they had been magnetized. I kept my tone simple and clear, stripped of emotional content. We were now on a first-name basis. Dear Ben. Best, Dani. But whenever my unruly mind wasn’t otherwise occupied, it returned to my parents.
Everyone involved in the story was either dead or very old. My parents were dead. Most of their friends were dead. My mother’s sister—to whom she was very close—was dead. Her husband, a surgeon, was dead. Dr. Edmond Farris was dead. Farris’s wife, Augusta, was dead. The Farris Institute had been shuttered a decade after my birth. But I was aware that there might still be living people who could shed light on what happened in that institute in Philadelphia that led to my conception. Doctors, nurses, clinicians, or technicians who had worked at Farris. Professors at Penn who might have known Farris himself. Colleagues in the then relatively new field of reproductive medicine. I didn’t have the luxury of emotion recollected in tranquillity. My job now was to amass as much information as quickly as I possibly could. Conveniently, this job also meant I could keep the tidal wave of my feelings at bay as I waited for a reply from Ben Walden.
One article I came across was a widely circulated 1958 wire service story that appeared in newspapers such as The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and The Tampa Tribune:
Test-Tube Baby Practice Grows; Now 30,000 in U.S.
Some 40,000 American children owe their start in life to test tube science.
Dr. Edmond Farris, director of the Institute for Parenthood in Philadelphia, said in an interview that even his estimate of “30,000 to 40,000 test tube tots” may be low. No one really knows exactly how many test tube children there are in the U.S. because there is no law requiring doctors to report on this practice.
Dr. Farris is one of an unknown number of scientists quietly working in this field, although laws have never been enacted to control artificial insemination of humans.
Allen D. Holloway, Chicago lawyer, in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Bar Assn., said that legislators should study the problem and adopt some uniform statute. He warned: “The act of artificial insemination involves criminal law, legitimacy, inheritance, and even spills over into the fields of theology, sociology and philosophy.”
Dr. Farris, like his colleagues in the field, thus operates in a legal no-man’s-land. He is conscious of religious thinking too, but as he puts it: “I see nothing wrong in trying to bring children of fine quality into the world.”
He described the donors in his institute as the “best material that Philadelphia medical schools can offer.”
The whole procedure is handled in strictest confidence. Records are heavily coded to prevent information from getting into the hands of would-be blackmailers.
As an added precaution, the couple involved is instructed to be intimate before and after the test tube procedure. This, according to a leading obstetrician, leaves the matter of the “real” father open to speculation.