WaPo: Where do babies come from? Let me tell you.

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On Parenting

 Perspective

Where do babies come from? Let me tell you.

By Jessie Glenn January 26

Salmon heading upstream to a fish hatchery in Oregon where their eggs and sperm will be harvested. (iStock)

My husband was off work and we decided to go out to the Columbia Gorge for a hike with the twins. Had I been to Bonneville Dam, he asked? I had not. In the driving rain, we shoved the twins into their stroller and dragged the water-hating dog out of the car. I was already resentful because I could tell it wasn’t going to be much of a hike.

We sloshed around 50 or 60 cement pools startlingly full of salmon and trout at different stages of development. The dog peered deeply into each pool, the whites of his eyes and slightly raised hackles showing his arousal around the creatures floating so close, yet living in an entirely different element. The other side. Permanently in utero.

[How my IVF baby made me reconsider my view of IVF]

Under a dripping concrete overhang was a viewing area where you could see underwater into a pool filled with sturgeon. The enormous dinosaur creatures slowly swam past the window while the twins pounded the glass, thrilled by the sight of the river monsters close up.

Continuing along the path, we ended up at the visitor’s center. The floor was cement and the color scheme a strict National Park Service green, brown and gray. As we went in, there was a movie on loop about the life cycle of the salmon, near information about the dam. Straight ahead was a viewing window and a sign reading: The Salmon Are In.

Lucky us! The salmon were running — the end of October and November are good times to see the spectacle. The salmon were let into the processing room through a chute ending in mesh baskets. The workers were just getting off break, and the fish flipped and churned in the basket, their sleek muscles toned and ready to fight further upstream if need be.

The workers prepared for the belt to start, and the lead on the line pushed a button next to the frothing basket of fish. They stopped moving. The woman next to us explained that first, the fish are shocked so they will stay calm. The belt then brought the salmon to the next worker, who massaged their bellies and separated them onto the male conveyor belt and the female conveyor belt.

On the day I visited, there were only male workers on the side with male fish and only female workers on the side with female fish. The male fish flow down the belt to a worker who picks up a fish and, with a smooth stroking motion, squeezes all of the sperm out into a paper cup — one cup per fish, each cup looking to be about three-fourths the way full. The fish then goes back on the belt and through another machine with a caution sign on the front. I believe it is another electric shock, but a fatal one this time. I asked what happens to the fish afterward, and the well-informed woman next to me said they go to the Oregon food bank, or to become pet food or for fertilizer.

The female fish go down the other ramp. Each fish has her belly massaged, then in a quick motion, she is sliced open, the lovely tangerine-colored eggs spilling into a container. Then she is placed back on the belt. I did not see where this ends — perhaps she’s sewn up, then sent home for bed rest, vitamins and a short course of oxycodone. No refills.

At a table right past the conveyor belt are four techs — three women and one man. They have sterile sample containers and PH strips. They take the cups of sperm and the containers of eggs and mix them. These will be the fish for the hatchery, and they will be released to start the cycle again.

The first time I did an in vitro fertilization cycle, I was shocked at how painful it was when all of my eggs were sucked out. I still don’t know what color my eggs are, but I doubt they’re tangerine. I made 18 of them after a month of hormones. After the techs fertilized the eggs with my husband’s sperm in a little cup, some of the embryos died in the lab and some doubled and doubled for several days until at day six there were four left alive. Of the four, two were lost while being transferred into me because the doctor didn’t see the scarring I had from a previous C-section. After the failed transfer, the chemicals in the belly shots I gave myself resulted in ovarian hyperstimulation and I had to be on bed rest for two weeks, eating my meals on my back, imagining the faces the lost embryos would never have. So much work to go through just to lose something.

The second time I did IVF, we used the remaining two frozen embryos from the first IVF. There were fewer hormones since I wasn’t growing eggs, but I needed intramuscular shots every day to make the eggs stick in there. I have never even imagined a bottom so black and blue as mine that cycle.

One of the two embryos stuck, and we got to see its little heart beat. We saved the troglodyte image of the otherworldly ultrasound and put it aside for the future baby book. The fertility department gave me a teal box containing a little spoon wrapped in tissue paper as a memento. Losing that fetus broke my heart much harder than I had imagined it would. I’m not sure what I did with the little spoon. It never left the box.

The third time I did IVF, I didn’t pay for it. After they lost the first two embryos, I negotiated a free cycle. They offered a free one if the second didn’t work out, but I insisted I wanted the option of a free one regardless of whether I achieved a pregnancy with the second attempt. (I’m still proud of this.)

After another long round of hormones, they gathered 14 eggs from me. Twelve were fertilized. Eight survived the six days in the lab of doubling and doubling again. Three were put back into me, and two made twins that stuck until they sliced me open and pulled them out. The lab did not give me spoons the second time I got pregnant.

I elbowed my husband gently at the visitor’s center: “Romantic, right?” We each held a twin, their snotty noses pressed to the viewing window of the fish-processing center.

I buried my face into a soft, graham cracker-smelling neck and thought about the five little embryos left frozen in the lab. What color were their eyes? ​Tiny minnow shrimp fish. Permanently waiting in another element until the belt starts or the shock ends.

Jessie Glenn is a writer, book publicist and professor at Portland State University in Oregon. She is working on a book of essays about mothering. She tweets. 

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