ink-stained wretches

Does the ‘Times’ Secretly Hate Alex Kuczynski?

We were unable to conceive our own, lucid thoughts about Alex Kuczynski’s story about hiring a woman from Pennsylvania as a surrogate mother in the Times Magazine this past weekend. Like her womb, our brain is small and delicate — the pictures alone, with the black nanny and the Christian Louboutins, put a strain on it, and the struggle to retain our respect for Kuczynski’s brutal honesty when reading some passages was ultimately too much for us to bear.

Such as this one:

As the months passed, something curious happened: The bigger Cathy was, the more I realized that I was glad — practically euphoric — I was not pregnant. I was in a daze of anticipation, but I was also secretly, curiously, perpetually relieved, unburdened from the sheer physicality of pregnancy. If I could have carried a child to term, I would have. But I carried my 10-pound dog in a BabyBjörn-like harness on hikes, and after an hour my back ached. Cathy was getting bigger, and the constraints on her grew. I, on the other hand, was happy to exploit my last few months of nonmotherhood by white-water rafting down Level 10 rapids on the Colorado River, racing down a mountain at 60 miles per hour at ski-racing camp, drinking bourbon and going to the Super Bowl. I had several friends around my age — 37 and up — who were pregnant with their first children at this time, and I was amazed at how their feet swelled like loaves of bread. They were haggard. They seemed sallow and tired, and they let their hair go gray…



So instead we offer you surrogate commentary from blogger Decorno, who went through the misery of thinking about this so we didn’t have to:



I am all for surrogacy, but they couldn’t have picked a less sympathetic person to describe her experience. Right cause, wrong advocate … The Times photographer and editor must hate this woman. And I think the Times also hates us a bit, trying to make a stink about this issue, when it’s not really a new one at all. A lot of vitriol is already spewing in the comments section of the NYT, but little of it is about surrogacy. That’s the red herring. The cover story should have been called, “Why We Hate Smug Yoga-Bodied Elite Women Like This,” because that seems to be the issue presented in this article.



Our thoughts exactly. Only our hair is still in our head and our cortex isn’t all stretched out!



From THIS article from The New York Times Magazine [Decorno]

Her Body, My Baby [NYTM]

Does the ‘Times’ Secretly Hate Alex Kuczynski?