PHOTO COURTESY CHILDCARE IS ESSENTIAL

A few years ago, Kisa MacIsaac, an early childhood educator (ECE) and mother of three in Winnipeg, tried to calculate the feasibility of putting three children in childcare for the summer. At 70 dollars per day, she “would have been working for nothing, anyways,” she says.

She ended up taking the summer off while her husband’s salary carried them through, but she knows that many others aren’t as lucky. Although Manitoba’s childcare fees are the second lowest in the country, “for many it’s still very, very expensive, especially if you have two or three children,” she says.

The lack of access to affordable childcare, especially during a global pandemic, when many people around the country have lost their jobs, was striking to MacIsaac. As government leaders began discussing what school would look like in the time of COVID-19, MacIsaac heard no mention of childcare. That’s why she joined a group of parents, ECEs, and community members to form Childcare is Essential, a Manitoba-based group advocating for publicly funded, high-quality daycare in the province.

When brainstorming a name, MacIsaac says, “The messaging that kept coming through is the words ‘childcare is essential.’” So, they went with it. Through weekly Zoom meetings, they planned campaigns and activities, ultimately mobilizing community members at a rally in late August in front of the Minister of Families, Heather Stefanson’s, office.

Members aren’t sure why affordable childcare isn’t on the provincial government’s priority list. Studies show that for every dollar invested in early childhood education, the payback is anywhere from six to 12 dollars. An investment in childcare, then, is an investment in an entire community.

There’s on-the-ground evidence to suggest this, too. In 2012, the provincial government added an early child development centre, Lord Selkirk Park Child Care Centre, and family resource centre in a social housing complex in northern Winnipeg. Using a learning approach specialized for under-resourced families, Healthy Child Manitoba, Manidoo Gi-Miini Gonaan, and Red River College studied the centre and found that children in the program made considerable gains in language development. Parents also reported multiple benefits, from financial security, to having time to work or go back to school, to developing trusting relationships with ECEs.

“If it wasn’t for the daycare, I wouldn’t have made it … I wouldn’t have gone to school. I wouldn’t have been working; I would still be on welfare,” one participant wrote online.

MacIsaac says she sees similar cases at the non-profit early learning and childcare program where she works. Families living below the poverty line receive a subsidy—a two-parent family with two preschool-aged children needs to make below $22,504 to receive the maximum subsidy. The extra time and money can give them opportunities to find new jobs or start saving to pay off loans or move into a nicer home. But as soon as they’re making a little more money, “their childcare subsidy gets clawed back and suddenly they can’t afford their childcare anymore,” she says.

In March, the government of Manitoba set aside $18 million to help ECEs open their own childcare centres at home or in the community in response to the COVID-19 childcare centre closures. But, MacIsaac says, “That’s not an exciting opportunity for me at all. I work in an extremely high-quality program with an amazing team.” It makes sense—evidence shows that on average, in North America, quality of care is higher in non-profit childcare centres.

And that’s what Childcare is Essential is fighting for. MacIsaac says success for the group looks like high-quality, universally accessible childcare with trained ECEs for anyone who needs—or wants—a space for their child.

“It sounds cheesy to be like ‘the children are our future,’ but they literally are, and anything we can do to help children in their early years is going to help everyone in the long term.”

Jean-Louis and Marie-Angélique Riel, ca. 1888, by Steele & Wing, albumen print

A freestanding wall decorated with blue motifs frames a glass case. Inside the case sits a brooch inscribed with a person’s name and dates of birth and death. On the other side of the wall, the front of the brooch is exposed: a portrait of a little girl, Alice Walker, the daughter of Canadian artist Horatio Walker who died at the age of nine from diphtheria—a disease that was once a common cause of death among Canadian children.

A Little History, an exhibit in the Canadian Museum of History’s Treasures From Library and Archives Canada (LAC) gallery, presents 36 artifacts that elevate children’s voices and presence in Canadian history. Some voices include daughter of Sir John A. Macdonald, Margaret Mary Theodora Macdonald, Sandford Fleming, and David Suzuki.

“I thought this was an opportunity to highlight this sort of little-known aspect of Canadian history,” says exhibit curator Carolyn Cook. “Children are typically absent from the historical narrative, and I think it’s important to look at what their experiences can shed light on. Because, really, they have their own stories.”

Many artifacts that were found and kept about children were actually produced by adults: government records, art, toys, textiles. The things that children made themselves were not prioritized. These things “kind of provide a more romanticized view of childhood.” Cook sees this exhibition as a step toward improving practices that include children’s history in Canada’s historical narrative, in all its unromantic glory.

The Canadian Museum of History and LAC did manage to find some artifacts that were created by children, such as a composition by a young Glenn Gould and a design submission for a new Canadian flag to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Cook believes the artifacts that were made by children “are the gems of the exhibition.”

We often forget that children lived through historic events, and that adults aren’t the only people who have been affected by them. A display houses a diary by 12-year-old Eleanora Hallen in which she details her voyage across the Atlantic from England to Upper Canada in 1835. She describes everything from a tussle over steak to seeing an iceberg for the first time.

In another display sits a photograph of a young David Suzuki on the back of a pick-up truck with his two sisters—the photo was taken inside a Japanese internment camp. Accompanying the photo is an interview with David Suzuki, who describes his relationship with nature while in the internment camp and speaks about how dangerous discrimination can be. Cook is right, the gems of the exhibition lie in the heart of the child, not in the hearts of the adults who know what’s best.

In many ways, this tiny classroom was just like any other: rows of young students looking up at their teacher, the day’s lesson displayed on the dusty chalkboard overhead. But this day was not about grammar or arithmetic. It was about the long fight for freedom. In South Sudan, it is rarely about anything else.

I watched as a small boy walked to the front of the room. “This is the Leer Primary School Drama Club,” he announced, unexpectedly firm for a child. “I hope you will enjoy.”

Then the teacher took centre stage, behind him, a chalkboard cluttered with notes on the local harvest, Jesus, and salvation. In his hand he grasped the long wooden stick that would act as his conductor’s wand. He thrust it upward and the children rose at its command. The call and answer was about to begin.

An invisible border split the class, forming a group of students on either side. The teacher pointed his wand to one section. “Yes!” the children cried out. Swung now to the other, his wand signalled the reply. “Yes for what?” the students boomed. This time in unison, each child rang the final call. “Yes for separation! Yes for the independence of Southern Sudan!”

The mood was hopeful, but solemn. The children seemed so young and I wondered how much they could possibly understand about the words they dutifully recited. To see a primary classroom charged with nationalist emotion was jarring at first, but in context, not surprising. In late 2010, the same sentiment permeated the entire region, spreading far into remote villages like this one, touching young and old alike. It was a sentiment that had been building for decades.

Starting in 1983, civil war between the central government and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) persisted for more than 20 years, resulting in nearly 2 million deaths and one of the largest and most gruelling displacements of refugees imaginable. A peace agreement ended the war in 2005, but six years later, as its terms came to a close, the South remained one of the most undeveloped regions in the world, and relations with the North had not improved.

Though the roots of Sudan’s problems are complex, for Southerners the solution became clear—secession from the North, independence, and freedom. In hopes of growing up in peace, these children sang for a nation of their own.

On July 9, 2011, that nation arrived. Following a referendum on January 9, 2011, in which a reported 99 percent of South Sudanese citizens voted for their independence, the Republic of South Sudan was born. Celebrations in the new nation’s capital of Juba lasted for days.

Still, the trials are not over for North or South Sudan. Leading up to the split, discourse in the South left room for little more than a simple separatist cry—a resounding Yes for independence. Now, unresolved issues of oil-sharing, citizenship, and border demarcation loom while the Northern government has started a new campaign of violence in its state of Southern Kordofan. The Republic of South Sudan may have gained the independence for which its children sang, but for North and South Sudanese, separation does not yet mean peace.

Illustration by Evan Munday.

On a cold mid-February afternoon under overcast skies, a school bell rings. The halls of Toronto’s Agnes Macphail Public School flood with children dressed in puffy jackets and schoolbags. Although a swift exodus befalls most schools at day’s end, Agnes Macphail still pulses with high-pitch chatter. Students linger in the foyer while others flock towards the school’s library. Amidst the rows of bookcases and computers, a group of students, ranging from grade six to eight, sit around tables as they talk animatedly and await the start of their book-club meeting.

The students burst into cheerful greetings as Diana Maliszewski, Agnes Macphail’s teacher-librarian, walks into the room. Dressed in a black cardigan, white dress shirt, and black pants, Maliszewski sits at the table amongst the intermediate students.

“So, which book are we going to talk about first?” Maliszewski asks. The children’s voices overlap and echo throughout the library. The group settles on Raina Telgemeier’s Smile, a paperback book boasting a turquoise-coloured cover and a yellow smiley face.

“I have to warn you,” Maliszewski says, “I didn’t get a chance to read this one.” The students erupt into playful jeers. “I know, I know,” Maliszewski says, hands on her face in mock embarrassment. “But it’s okay because you guys can tell me all about it.” The children rifle through the pages as they talk excitedly about the novel. “I read it twice,” chirps one girl seated to the right of Maliszewski.

During the club meeting, a group of boys amble into the library and linger in front of a shelf of colourful books. “I’m sorry guys, but the library’s closed. We have a club meeting going on,” Maliszewski says apologetically. The boys groan. “I know. I’m sorry, but I’m glad you guys love this place. I really am.”

Students jokingly scolding their teacher for not reading; children looking crestfallen when told the school’s library is closed. It plays like an episode of The Twilight Zone, one that parents and teachers across the country would love to see replicated. But what accounts for the kids’ enthusiasm is the type of books they’re reading: graphic novels.

Maliszewski is one of the few teachers in Canada who dedicate a student club to graphic novels. But she is one of a growing number of educators and literacy advocates who believe the often-misunderstood genre could be the key to unlocking literacy for reluctant readers.

A staggering 48 percent of Canadians over 16 struggle with poor reading skills. Literacy is commonly measured on a five-level scale, with levels three and up considered adequate to function well in contemporary society. The Canadian Council on Learning estimates that 12 million Canadians do not meet that standard, meaning they cannot cope with many basic reading tasks — things like interpreting simple graphs, reading short text, and integrating pieces of information. The absence of such rudimentary abilities make it difficult to complete high school, acquire new job skills, or even decipher a medicine label.

The current statistics are bleak, and the number of adults with low literacy is actually poised to increase by 25 percent over the next 20 years just based on population growth. Literacy organizations, parents, educators, employers — everyone is looking for new ways to get Canadians excited about reading and improve these troubling numbers. But there’s little hope for change — unless we try something new.

Although an avid reader as a child, Maliszewski didn’t discover graphic novels until her adult years when she took the course “Comics and Graphic Novels in Schools and Public Libraries,” at the University of Alberta, where she received her masters degree in the teacherlibrarianship program in 2010. The genre quickly hooked her: “The skies parted and the light shone down,” she says.

She joined the TinLids Greater Toronto Area Graphic Novels Club, a group of educators and publishers who gather to discuss the educational potential of graphic novels. In 2004, Maliszewski established a graphic novel section at Agnes Macphail’s school library. “It took off like a rocket,” says Maliszewski. “It was insanely popular, especially with the boys. A whole bunch of people just loved it.”

More and more graphic novels have ascended to respectability in literary circles lately, but the whiff of pulp entertainment — given the genre’s roots in 20th century comic books — has tended to make teachers wary of their usefulness. For every Pulitzer-winning Maus, Art Spiegelman’s haunting allegory of his Jewish ancestors fleeing the Nazis, or Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s poignant adolescent memoir of revolutionary Iran, there seemed to be thousands of mindlessly violent, sexually retrograde, and narratively bankrupt superhero yarns. Novels are regarded as educational and nourishing; comic books as depraved trash.

Of course, there are also plenty of lousy books without drawings in them. As the depth and breadth of good graphic novels available has grown over the last few decades, some educators have started to see how a more visually dynamic presentation can boost reading skills without feeling like a chore.

In an article entitled “Expanding Literacies Through Graphic Novels,” [PDF] comics scholar Gretchen Schwarz argues the benefits of using graphic novels as a way to expand and strengthen literacy skills. Schwarz says graphic novel readers have to pay attention to conventional literary elements of plot, character, and dialogue as well as interpret visual elements such as colour, shading, panel layout, and even lettering style, making graphic novels an engaging and sophisticated form of reading.

Maliszewski also believes the combination of word and image can help reluctant readers who have short attention spans or problems visualizing. “Comics are great for so many different areas in which people have struggled with literacy issues,” she says. “They’re the great equalizer because they’re enjoyed by kids who are not strong readers as well as kids who are strong readers.”

At 70, Ellen Szita knows firsthand the perils of low literacy skills. While growing up in Brighton, England, Szita was relegated to the “D” class throughout school because of her difficulties with literacy. When Szita was 13, a teacher unexpectedly asked her to solve a math problem during class. Unable to read, Szita froze.

The teacher ordered her to stand in front of the class. “You’re not even trying to do this,” he bellowed. Szita stood motionless as the teacher insulted her in front of the other students. As she walked back toward her desk, the teacher grabbed the blackboard eraser and threw it at her head. A year later, Szita dropped out of school.

After immigrating to Canada at age 18, Szita eventually moved to Vancouver, married, and had four children. For decades, she hid her literacy difficulties from her family. When her children asked for help with their homework, Szita asserted she was too busy. She couldn’t understand her children’s report cards and dreaded parentteacher meetings.

The one time Szita did meet with one of her children’s teachers, she dressed up and emphasized her British accent as a way of masking her challenges with literacy. “I would tell the teacher, ‘Oh, yes I understand,’” Szita recalls. “But I didn’t understand what the teacher was even saying. She was talking about algebra. I never even heard of the word ‘algebra.’ I didn’t know if she was talking about English or math.”

The turning point for Szita emerged after she and her husband divorced in 1979. Unable to support herself, Szita searched for employment. She applied to two jobs but was fired from both because of her low literacy skills. By 1987, Szita’s psychiatrist diagnosed her as dyslexic and referred her to the Victoria READ society, a non-profit organization that helps youth and adults develop and hone their literacy skills.

There, at age 46, Szita accomplished something she thought improbable: she learned to read.

As a way of promoting literacy awareness, Szita spent years sharing her experience at speaking engagements with high schools, colleges, universities, prisons, and other organizations. In 1994, the Governor General presented Szita with the Flight for Freedom Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literacy for her advocacy work. Today, Szita is the chair of the Canadian Adult Literacy Learners, an arm of a non-profit organization called the Canadian Literacy and Learning Network that supports provincial and territorial literacy coalitions across Canada.

For Szita, graphic novels and comics contain engaging and compelling stories that can encourage reading and learning amongst those with low literacy skills. Szita believes comics are an effective teaching tool that can help children and adults perceive reading as something to enjoy, instead of dread. “I think it’s a huge help,” says Szita. “You need to be happy about what you’re learning and if it’s interesting, it’s going to make a huge difference.”

Scott Tingley, a grade-three teacher at Riverside Consolidated School in Riverside-Albert, New Brunswick and founder of comicsintheclassroom.net, noticed the difference in his students’ attitudes toward reading and writing after he used an Owly comic by Andy Runton and a Monkey vs. Robot picture by James Kochalka as story starters for a grade one and two class he taught five years ago. Prompted by his students’ enthusiasm, Tingley incorporated a comics section in his classroom. “I have kids reading them all the time and I have kids from previous years coming over to borrow them,” says Tingley. “For some, comics are a joy to read. They can’t get enough.”

In his 12 years of teaching, Tingley has never encountered a student who didn’t enjoy creating comics. “At the early years they are so used to joining their drawings with their words that comics come naturally to them,” says Tingley. “I don’t try to trick kids into thinking they aren’t writing when they are creating comics; on the contrary, I make sure they are keenly aware that making comics is just another form of writing.”

While Tingley and Maliszewski use graphic novels and comics primarily in elementary school settings, the genre is equally pertinent in other educational stages. Guy Demers, an English teacher at Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School in Vancouver, first thought about using graphic novels and comics in the classroom during the mid-1980s when they started to mature as an art form.

His first attempts at using graphic novels in the classroom occurred after he noticed a few of his students struggled with reading. He gave the students copies of Usagi Yojimbo, a comic series created by Stan Sakai. “It got them so excited about reading that they burned through all 20 volumes that were out at the time,” says Demers. “They started reading books along the same lines.”

The medium is finding uses in post-secondary education too. Rob Heynen, a professor in York University’s program in social and political thought, is one of the many professors at the university who has used graphic novels as course material. In his fourth-year course, “Visual Culture: Histories, Theories, and Politics,” Heynen incorporated Alan Moore’s Watchmen, an influential deconstruction of the superhero narrative, into his lecture on comics and graphic arts in popular culture.

Heynen says graphic novels, which depend on the reader’s ability to interpret and create meanings out of sequential images, are a useful way to develop a person’s literacy skills. “Even for people with low levels of literacy, images are still things that they can read,” he says. But Heynen believes the types of literacy skills required for graphic novels is different from that of traditional prose material, although both are related through their use of text. “They’re two different kinds of literacy in a way,” says Heynen.

However, Maliszewski says the idea of graphic novels as a “transitional medium” is one of the stigmas hindering the genre. “It’s a little elitist to say comics will lead us to ‘real’ reading,” says Maliszewski. “If you just read comics, that’s okay. Your parents might not think so, but it really is.”

Graphic novels still labour under the stigma toward comic books that swept North American culture in the 1940s and ‘50s, when censorious researchers sounded alarms over comics’ sexual and violent content. Most notable was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book, The Seduction of the Innocent, which dubiously but sensationally correlated real-world “deviant” behaviour with the kind of crime stories depicted in pulp comics of the time.

Although that kind of moral panic is no longer widespread, Maliszewski says she still encounters misconceptions about the genre. She overheard a fellow teacher proclaim that all manga (the massively popular Japanese comics) are pornographic—decidedly not the case—and still runs into resistance from teachers and librarians who believe sex and violence is still pervasive.

In general, the feedback to Maliszewski’s graphic novels collection has been positive, but not without some controversy. Some parents complained their kids only borrowed graphic novels and dismissed more traditional prose books.

Guy Demers says he also hears complaints that graphic novels, by adding visual elements, rob readers of the ability to imagine a book’s narrative themselves. “This is the comment that, to me, speaks to the general public’s ignorance of the form,” he says. “Would Citizen Kane have been better as a book? Would the Mona Lisa have made a better poem? It’s a different form and needs to be examined on its own terms.”

If the stigmas and misconceptions about reading graphic novels are common, the ones facing people with low literacy are even more widespread. Advocates believe illiteracy is a silent epidemic, misunderstood or, more commonly, simply ignored. Canada, for instance, is one of the few developed countries in the world without a national reading strategy. “The general public still doesn’t understand literacy and what it means to have low or poor literacy skills,” says Lindsay Kennedy, senior manager at the Movement for Canadian Literacy. But the social and economic effects are deep and widespread: low literacy is strongly associated with poor health and poverty. “When your literacy skills are low, you’re at risk,” says Kennedy.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A common misperception is that people with poor literacy cannot read at all, which is seldom the case. Far more common is low literacy, in which people can glean the bare minimum from a text. “Literacy is very much like a muscle,” says Kennedy. “If you don’t use it at all, you tend to forget how to use it.”

The Canadian government’s failure to address the country’s low literacy levels isn’t just a disconcerting issue for literacy organizations; educators like Maliszewski are also rallying for awareness and change. A national reading summit in 2009 assembled educators, librarians, academics, and publishers alike to discuss plans for a Canadian national reading strategy.

Although Maliszewski supports this movement, she says one of the problems the summit faced was the “prioritizing of literature,” which placed so-called “alternative reading materials,” such as graphic novels and comics, below that of traditional prose. She’s troubled by the implications of that.

“If you want to have a national reading strategy, you can’t be elitist about what people are reading,” says Maliszewski. “Reading comics is still reading. And depending on the comic, it’s really sophisticated reading.”

While the idea of graphic novels and comics as a legitimate means to combat low literacy levels in Canada is still contentious, there are educators across the country hoping people will see the merits of the graphic novel genre, in its ability to act both as a link to many other kinds of reading, and as a fulfilling and meaningful pastime in itself. Maliszewski wants to see all kinds of reading “not just tolerated, but celebrated.”

With so many Canadians facing literacy problems, and all the attendant difficulties that follow, it seems irresponsible not to try. Lindsay Kennedy believes the stakes are about as high as they can be: “Literacy is about giving people power. It’s about giving them freedom.”

Syrus Marcus Ware. Production still by Joshua Allen from "Ten," directed by Sarah Sharkey Pearce.

For the last two years, anyone weary of the increasingly commercialized and blissfully apoliticized nature of Pride in Toronto has made a beeline for the back-to-the-future experience that is the Trans March. It’s small, friendly, community-based, unendorsed by any corporate interest. It’s also politicized, giddy, and endearingly disorganized, the way many of us remember Prides of yore. It’s not just nostalgia that draws a bigger crowd each year, though — it’s the sense that trans activism has taken up the social-change banner from a gay movement that dropped it the moment the right to marry became the dominant political cause.

Syrus Marcus Ware, a baby-faced, 35-year-old trans guy, was happily agitating for a trans presence at Pride even before the march got organized. In 2008, he and a buddy “pushed and pushed and convinced” the organizers to start a trans stage (now a regular feature of Pride celebrations), but he’d been kick-starting trans, black, and prison-related causes long before that. Like many trans people, he came out first as gay, became an activist in high school (“I wanted to change attitudes at school and in my family,” he says, “and had a strong belief that the world could, and should, be different”), finally coming out as trans in 2000 after grappling with his feelings for at least a decade. Since then, he’s more than made up for lost time.

He’s an artist (painting, performance, and video) whose work often blurs into activism and whose activism can have the exhilaration of art (a program co-ordinator for youth and young adults at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he’s not wary of blending politics with art appreciation—his take on the recent Maharaja blockbuster show stressed the impact of British imperialism as much as it did the exhibit’s splendour). He’s a host of CIUT 89.5 FM’s Resistance on the Sound Dial. He helped create the publication Primed: The Back Pocket Guide for Transmen and the Men Who Dig Them. He’s involved with Gay/Bi/Queer Transmen Working Group, with a mandate to provide sexual health information to trans guys who have sex with men. He helped develop TransFathers 2B, a pilot course for trans men considering parenting (he recently got pregnant and is in a relationship with another trans guy). He works for prison abolition, both culturally, through the Prison Justice Film Festival, and politically, through the Prisoners’ Justice Action Committee, a group building abolition strategies within the black, indigenous, and trans communities.

If the gay movement opened the door to sexual diversity, the trans movement seems to be kicking it off its hinges, encouraging exploration well beyond gay, straight, and bi, creating a happily dizzy-making world where guys get pregnant, where that bearded dude with the great pecs turns out to have a vagina, where that gorgeous babe intends to keep her penis because she no longer has to comply with cultural expectations of gender. And the rest of us? We get a gender playground, open to all. “There are so many human variations outside the cookie-cutter paradigm of human desire,” says Ware. “We have to stop pathologizing them.” He’s working on it.

The birth control pill has been a major game changer in the arena of women’s reproductive rights, opening up new doors in society and the workplace. But, in the wake of the birth control pill’s 50th anniversary on the market in the United States and its 40th in Canada, a major question remains: will there ever be a version for men?

The development of a male pill has been a longstanding joke in the pharmaceutical industry, where someone is always willing to predict that the pill is “five to 10 years away” from becoming a marketplace reality. While this ongoing delay is due in part, to the technical challenges of developing a reliable contraceptive formula for men, backward assumptions that men would refuse to take a male birth control pill have arguably proven to be a much greater obstacle.

Researchers, however, have actually proven the opposite. A 2005 international survey conducted by Berlin’s Center of Epidemiology and Health Research found that a majority of men reported interest in using some form of oral contraception, a finding that is supported by two other studies. “I think modern men would like to take part in this decision,” says Ken Rosendal, the CEO of Spermatech, a Norwegian company currently in the early stages of developing a non-hormonal male birth control pill. “A pill for men would have less side effects than a hormonal pill for women.” Rosendal says, however, that funding is a key barrier in the development of such a pill; while biomedical research companies like Spermatech may have the scientific know-how to make the male pill a reality, finding investors to cover the costs necessary to bring the drug to market (an estimated US$2 billion, according to Rosendal) remains a constant challenge.

This means that, until society decides to catch up to science, the male pill will continue—year after year—to remain five to 10 years away.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Striatic

I’m not afraid of labour.

I’m not afraid of the intense pressure of my uterus contracting, tightening, pushing…

My cervix slowly dilating… Once open zero centimetres and currently stretching to a whopping 10 centimetres? Bring it!

I’m not even scared about pushing my baby into this world and the likelihood of my vagina tearing.

What I am terrified of is being induced.

There are a couple ways of inducing labour which, when applied to a healthy mother with a low-risk pregnancy, usually happens because she has gone over her “due date.” From what I can tell, more often than not, they cause problems for both the mother and baby.

The most common medical ways to induce labour is with synthetic drugs oxytocin and prostaglandin. Prostaglandin-mimicking drugs like Cervidil and Prepidil are used to thin the cervix and oxytocin-imitating drugs like Syntocinon or Pitocin are used to bring on contractions through intravenous injection.

Some of the reasons why I have no interest in being induced this way:

• While Cervidil is inserted like a tampon and Prepidil is a gel, Syntocinon and Pitocin are given intravenously. Being hooked up to an IV limits mobility making natural pain relief (bath, shower, moving around) more difficult.
• Pain relief is especially important after an induction because as if natural labour didn’t hurt enough, these drugs cause unnaturally strong contractions, often leading to what is known as the cascade of interventions.
• Induction in this way can cause fetal distress (depressed fetal heart rate patterns and decreased oxygen availability.) This often results in the use of forceps, vacuum extraction or C-section—all part of the cascade.
• The unnatural contractions means a woman is more likely to use pain medication (ie: an epidural, a common next step in yes, the cascade…)
• Having an oxytocin drip like Syntocinon or Pitocin, will usually mean continuous fetal heart monitoring. This makes going into the shower or tub for some natural pain relief (warm water) impossible.

I think when my baby’s ready to come out, she’ll come out. They predicted she’d be six pounds at birth, so I would be more than happy to give her a little more time to bake in this oven. If there is plenty of amniotic fluid left, and the baby is not under stress, there’s no need for her to be born so immediately.

It’s important for people (hello, grandparents!) to realize the due date means very little and is only an estimate. It assumes that all women run on a perfect 28-day cycle and that we all ovulate at the same point in that cycle. But that’s not the case.

Only something like three to five per cent of women deliver on their anticipated due date, and most of the time doctors will wait  between seven and 10 days before insisting on induction.

At my last appointment , I talked to my doctor about what would happen if I went over my due date (February 9 — yesterday!). She said she’d give me a week and after that, yes, she’d like to hook me up to an IV, and likely give me Syntocinon.

She was pretty responsive when I asked if there were alternatives to an intravenous intervention. We sorted out the fact that I did not want to be hooked up to an IV unless it was absolutely necessary and she said the alternative could be Cervadil. But if Cervadil’s job is to thin my cervix; at 37.5 weeks it was already 80 percent effaced, I’m not sure what the point is.

I was also surprised and hugely relieved when she told me I could, of course, decide not to have the induction so soon, bringing me closer to 42 weeks if I wanted. I would have to schedule regular non-stress tests to make sure everything was okay in there, which was fine by me.

Not every woman realizes that while the doctor might like a patient to deliver no later than a week after her due date, and if there are no medical complications that would make induction necessary to save the baby/mother’s life, whether or not to be induced really is the mother’s decision.

Luckily, sex is the best drug

There are perfectly natural ways to rustle up a little prostaglandin and oxytocin. Why not bring on labour the way this whole pregnancy thing started?

Semen is the most concentrated source of prostaglandins that exists. The synthetic Cervidil and Prepidil can’t compare. These prostaglandins that occur naturally are not associated with the host of potential problems that come along with the other stuff—won’t cause fetal distress, a ruptured uterus, unnaturally painful contractions etc. Getting some semen on your cervix will help it thin—a necessary step in labour.

Breast stimulation, which goes quite nicely with intercourse, releases oxytocin. Orgasms do the same. When oxytocin is released the uterine muscles contract! That sounds a little more fun than an IV.

In the end, the baby will usually come out when she’s good and ready. Who would want to leave the comfort of a warm, cozy womb anyways? Take your time, baby.

Sources: Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. While this book has largely succeeded in helping me feel worse about delivering in a hospital as opposed to at home, it has been a great resource, one I relied on heavily for much of the information in this blog post.

Canada's daycare scheme is in disarray. Creative commons photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

Advocates have long argued that a publicly funded universal daycare system would support low-income families, single parents, and working mothers. Support for variants of universal child care was a hallmark of the Mulroney, Chrétien, and Martin election platforms—but none of them made it happen.

Instead, in 2006, the then new Harper government made the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) its first major social policy initiative, paying families $100 per month for each child under six, money intended to support child-care costs. Arguing that they were giving parents more freedom in making child care decisions, the Conservatives’ UCCB was, and remains, a rejection of the very idea of universal daycare. Five years on, the problems with the new system are clear.

The UCCB is “ill conceived and inequitable,” says Ken Battle, President of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy. He raises several objections: despite the sound-bite friendly “hundred bucks a month” concept, the UCCB is actually “virtually incomprehensible” to the average citizen. That $100 is considered taxable income, so no family actually gets $1,200 a year. Furthermore, it’s actually harmed lower-income, single-parent families, who no longer receive the annual $249 young child supplement (which was quietly abolished to help pay for the UCCB). Given the complexities and perversity of the tax system, higher-income families actually receive the highest net benefit.

Battle also criticizes the social engineering implied in the UCCB, under which not all families are created equal. Two-parent families with two parents working actually pay more in taxes than two-parent families (with the same total income) with one parent staying home. This is because that extra $1,200 in yearly income is taxable in the hands of whichever parent earns less. In practice, this means the government privileges families with a stay at home parent—and because of weak pay equity regulation, that generally means mom stays home.

These are minor gripes, though, compared to the fact that the math just doesn’t work: with daycare costs often well in excess of $7,000 a year, $1,200 is simply not enough. Battle argues that in order for a system of cash payments to meaningfully reduce poverty and help families, the older Canada Child Tax Benefit would need to be boosted to $5,000 per child per year for low- and middle-income families. Food Banks Canada recommends the same figure as part of its larger argument that a well funded child care plan would be one of the most effective ways to fight hunger and child poverty.

It’s unlikely that the Conservatives will reverse direction, and the federal Liberals have now surrendered the issue, recently dropping their long-standing commitment to universal daycare. In October 2009, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff called universal daycare a “legacy” item for his party: “I am not going to allow the deficit discussion to shut down discussion in this country about social justice,” Ignatieff told the Toronto Star in Februrary 2010. Last October, however, blaming the economic forecast and Conservative spending priorities, Ignatieff announced the Liberals would no longer push for a universal public child care program.

With the feds asleep at the switch, some advocates are hopeful that the provinces will step in. Organizations like the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care point to Quebec’s high-profile $7-a-day daycare system as an example to follow. In the 10 years after its introduction in 1997, the province’s child-poverty rates declined by 50 percent. The program’s problem is that it’s too popular, with a shortage of available spaces and long waiting lists. Though the Conservatives say the UCCB is all about giving families more choice, it now obstructs universal publicly funded child care—the choice that most would like to be able to make.

Illustration by Sylvia Nickerson

The test kitchen of the Bayview Village Loblaws grocery store in North Toronto is packed. Around 30 women and men sit clustered in pairs in a horseshoe, framed by the cupboards and counters lining the room. They are almost all white, aged 30 to 60 years old. Some small houseplants sit on the counter, the floor is the colour of cream of carrot soup, and the cupboards are dark green; the aesthetic is vaguely gradeschool. Orchestral pop floats in from the grocery store, while outside the window, one floor below, shoppers select their salad greens. Some of the couples talk quietly amongst themselves. Others wait silently with an air of anticipation. No one is here for a cooking lesson.

A cheery woman in an argyle sweater takes up her position in the centre of the chairs and begins to speak. Welcome to “How to Adopt.” This seminar, hosted by the Adoption Council of Ontario, is Adoption 101 for prospective parents interested in the idea but unsure where to start. The class outlines the various types of adoption and introduces attendees to parents who have gone through with adoption and who can speak about their personal experiences.

There are three types of adoption in Ontario: public, private and international. ACO executive director Pat Convery stresses that each kind of adoption offers its own challenges and rewards, and the route a couple or individual chooses to pursue depends on their own personal situation. What she does not say, however, is that some personal situations affect the available options more than others.

Growing up in her home country of Iran, Shirin* never imagined she would find herself in this situation. For many years, Iran promoted the virtues of large families. Shirin herself has many siblings. But now the Iranian government is thwarting her maternal ambitions. Shirin now lives in Canada and wants to adopt an Iranian child, but her birth country has declared her unfit. She came to the ACO meeting to learn about her adoption options, but unlike the couples here tonight, Shirin faces an additional obstacle. According to many countries, including Iran, she’s an unacceptable candidate because she’s gay.

Shirin is just one of an increasing number of queer women to pursue the option of international adoption, only to find that most countries classify them as substandard parents. Single mothers and lesbian couples disproportionately face barriers to international adoption because, not being in a heterosexual marriage, they’re classified as single parents. Many countries explicitly state they will not allow single women, or gays and lesbians, to adopt children, favouring a family structure that includes a mother and father. While some countries do allow single women to adopt, no other country among those usually sourced for foreign adoption, with the exception of the United States, permits openly gay women to parent their children.

International adoption is popular in Canada, with Canadian citizens and permanent residents adopting around 2,000 foreign children each year. Canadians apply to private adoption agencies licensed by specific countries to place children with parents here. Of the three types of adoption, international adoptions are the most expensive, costing parents $25,000 to $50,000 per child. The $85 that couples pay to attend sessions like the Adoptions Council seminar is just the beginning. Every prospective parent must undergo a “homestudy”—a series of in-home evaluations by adoption practitioners to ensure the applicants will be prepared and competent parents—as well as complete the mandatory adoptive parents training course known as PRIDE (Parent Resources for Information, Development and Education). While the Children’s Aid Society does not charge for these services, many individuals opt to pay the thousands of dollars it costs to go through private agencies, because it cuts down on wait times.

For many Canadians, the expense is worth it. International adoptions are popular because younger children are more readily available; at the very least there is a perception that kids up for adoption through the Children’s Aid Society may be older, part of a sibling group, or have special needs. With private adoptions, there is the risk that a birth mother will change her mind and an adoptive parent’s money and effort will be spent in vain. International adoption provides prospective parents with a formulaic stability. There is lots of paperwork, months of waiting, and usually travel abroad, but the path to parenthood is clear and understandable. Parental age is another factor: women who delayed having families, whether to pursue careers or for any other reason, face barriers within the domestic adoption process that can often be avoided with international adoption. Women over 50 are unlikely to be given an infant domestically, for instance, but several countries, such as Bulgaria, have higher parental age limits for infant adoption. Some women, such as Shirin, have a connection to a certain country or region and would like to adopt a child from that part of the world. For all these reasons, international adoption is an important option—and for many, it is a last resort after the domestic adoption process fails. Yet a growing subset of potential parents are being excluded by the countries where Canadians adopt from most. Almost one quarter of all children within Canada adopted internationally in 2008 came from China—a country that only permits heterosexual couples to adopt.

Many lesbian, bisexual, and trans women dismiss international adoption, because of its near impossibility for them and also because they object to their sexual orientation being treated as a liability. Some queer women, however, view these discriminatory policies as just one more problem they have to solve in order to adopt. These women opt instead to conceal their sexual orientation and go through the rigorous application procedures closeted, and in many cases they successfully adopt children from countries that discriminate against LGBT individuals.

As for Shirin’s plan, she is unsure of her options. She is a tall, fit woman with rich brown eyes and a few smile lines around her mouth. She has a discernable accent when she speaks. Shirin looks younger than she is, but in her late thirties she knows her options for adoption are narrowing. “I never admitted it to my family,” she says, “but I want to have children.” She wants a baby, preferably a healthy one, and while a child from the Middle East is no longer a possibility, there are still other alternatives open to her. Shirin does have one advantage; she may be gay—but she is also single.

There are 83 contracting states to the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoptions. In the nearly two decades since the agreement was concluded, it has had a profound influence on international adoption for LBT women.

Designed to safeguard the interests of children and to combat child trafficking, the convention has changed how countries regulate adoption in several significant ways. Under the convention, keeping children within their own families or countries is prioritized. Foreign adoption is considered a last resort, to be taken only when all other domestic options have been exhausted.

“It’s taken away some of the worries that adopting families would have,” says Pat Convery, meaning that certain key questions are answered: “Was this child actually legally relinquished? Did the parent have every opportunity to parent the child? Did they really look to make sure there were no family members? Was there for sure no money that changed hands in those areas that would be illegal under Canadian law?”

But while the Hague Convention has been a positive measure for inter-country adoption in general, it has also made it more difficult for queer women to adopt. The U.S., as the only source country that permits openly queer parents to adopt, used to be a haven for many LGBT and non-LGBT would-be adoptive parents. Since signing onto the Hague Convention, however, more emphasis has been placed on securing domestic adoption for American children in need of homes.

More than the Hague Convention, however, it is countries’ own value systems that pose the largest obstacles to queer Canadians adopting abroad. Chris Veldhoven is the Queer Parenting Programs Coordinator at the 519 Church Street Community Centre in Toronto, and he teaches a seminar to would-be fathers entitled Daddies & Papas 2B that explores the topic of adoption among other parenting models and family creation practices.

“The screening tools for some countries are becoming more explicitly heterocentric,” says Veldhoven, “so it’s much more difficult for people to find a country that will officially welcome someone and not discriminate on sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Historically, Veldhoven says, lesbians led the queer community in adopting, but increasingly gay male couples are also looking to adopt. Despite domestic legal victories that prevent discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, there remains a stigma surrounding single men (or “single” men) adopting kids. Within inter-county adoption, this stigma is magnified. Single women may find their international adoption choices limited, but their situation is still better than that of single men—few countries even consider male applicants.

Elizabeth’s house is on a quiet street in the east end of Toronto. It sits across from a park where kids are playing, despite the grey morning sky. Birds chirp from the trees. Inside, the living room is cozy with wooden floors and little purple coffee tables on which Elizabeth serves tea.

When Elizabeth adopted her daughter in the late ’90s, she knew many other lesbians who were exploring adoption. But none of her other gay friends were adopting from China; Elizabeth was able to do so because at that time the country had not yet banned single women from adopting. She began her homestudy process in late 1995 and had her daughter by the summer of 1997. Most of the girls up for adoption in China at the time were there as a result of the one-child policy and, unlike in many other countries, were from poor families rather than ones with drug and alcohol problems, which meant the babies were more likely to be healthy. The adoption process was well regulated; China seemed like the ideal country to adopt from.

“I felt like it would be a clean process,” she says, “and that I would be adopting a child who otherwise wouldn’t have had a family.” Elizabeth is in her 60s now and has been with her partner for over 20 years. In addition to her adopted daughter, they have a biological child together. She is a strong-framed woman with short hair that is a mixture of dark and lighter shades of grey. She sits with her legs crossed in jeans and a black cardigan, her purple shirt matching the frames of her glasses. Going to China without her partner to collect their daughter was difficult. “I really had to censor myself all the time,” Elizabeth says. She went with several heterosexual couples from the same agency and struggled with the urge to be honest about her sexuality as everyone bonded over the experience of meeting their children. The trip lasted two weeks.

“My deal with myself, when I actually went to China,” she says, “was, no matter what the circumstances, I would not reveal my real self and real situation.”

Elizabeth pulls out photo albums of pictures from her trip to collect her daughter. She reminisces about the time abroad and gushes about her daughter: “Isn’t she adorable?” she coos, and indeed, she is.

Elizabeth found her social worker through a referral from friends who were adopting as out lesbians domestically. She says she felt comfortable with the social worker that conducted her homestudy but won’t talk about the experience of closeting herself. She feels unable to confirm or deny whether she lied about her sexuality for the evaluation process. Regardless of her evaluation, Elizabeth was adopting from China during the best possible period for LBT women to adopt from that country: before China declared it would no longer permit single female applicants. In 2007, the country amended its requirements so that all single women were forced to sign an affidavit swearing they were not gay. “If you were a single woman you had to write a letter saying you weren’t a lesbian,” says Elizabeth, taking a sip of tea. “That would have been a huge crisis for me if that had been the case when I was in the process. I don’t know what I would have done.”

Paradoxically, as social equality for LGBT individuals has strengthened within Canada, international adoption has become more difficult for queer women. Adoption practioners who conducted the homestudies of lesbian or bisexual women 10 or 15 years ago might have been willing to take a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” attitude; if they thought someone would make a good parent, they could opt to keep a parent’s sexual orientation out of their homestudy report. That’s significantly less likely to be the case today.

“If you’re going to be out and you have to have your homestudy done by a domestic social worker, they’re not as willing to censor anymore because of the ethics of it,” says Veldhoven. “In the face of decreased homophobia domestically, social workers are saying, ‘Now we have to be true about your family configuration because we don’t want to hide it, because you shouldn’t have to hide it.’ But for many countries internationally you do hide it.”

The process of the homestudy itself has also changed considerably over the last decade. Jackie Poplack is a social worker who has been working in the field for four decades and has been an adoption practitioner, which includes conducting homestudies, for the last 14 years. According to Poplack, homestudies have become much more standardized and involve a lot more verification than they used to. Poplack has worked with queer couples seeking children and says that for social workers, looking the other way is not an option. “I’m going to be 100 percent honest and if I have a question or concern I say it,” she says. But for prospective parents who are single, there’s a certain degree of plausible deniability. In her years as a practitioner, Poplack has had one or two clients who said they were heterosexual, and who might have believed that themselves, but who she thought could have been gay. When it comes to homestudies, she acknowledges that, regardless of sexuality, people will try and smooth over any aspects of their character that they think will diminish their chances of securing a child.

Lisa is one woman who hid it. In 2005, she adopted a baby girl from Haiti. She was closeted to her social worker, so the woman classified her as heterosexual on her homestudy report. Lisa was single, so while there were some fridge magnets to remove and books to hide, there was no life partner to implausibly pass off as a roommate. Today she is wearing blue jeans and an olive T-shirt with “garden hoe” written across it in black letters. As she sits sipping her mug of coffee, she smiles, talking about the process of adopting her daughter, who arrived in Canada at nine months old and who is now happily enrolled in grade school with no idea of the half-truths her mother told to secure her.

“My goal was to never lie,” says Lisa, picking her words carefully. “But not necessarily to say everything.”

The Sherbourne Health Centre sits at 333 Sherbourne Street in downtown Toronto, a massive structure of glass and concrete with wood accents elevated from the road.

Across the street is Allan Gardens. People sit on benches and soak up the sun by the greenhouse. Squirrels play in the bare branches of the trees and scurry up the wrought iron lampposts that dot the grounds. Rachel Epstein’s office is on the second floor of the centre. Epstein is coordinator of the LGBTQ Parenting Network at the centre. The parenting course she designed, Dykes Planning Tykes, has been running since 1997.

In Epstein’s years of experience working with queer parents she has seen women closet themselves and get children. But today she is more pessimistic about the possibilities for LBT women to adopt from abroad.

“Basically, queers do not see international adoption as an option,” she says. More countries are selective about who adopts and who doesn’t, and choose heterosexual married couples over single individuals. Epstein worries about the personal toll exacted by denying your sexuality. “In the past, either you are single or you closet yourself. You closet your relationship,” says Epstein. “I mean, even single people find it hard to go closeted for this process, and it can be not just the adoption process but for a while afterwards.”

For a potential LBT parent, finding a social worker to whom she can be open about her sexuality—and who is willing to omit her sexual orientation from the homestudy report—is rare. How open a woman will be with her social worker is a crucial decision that can set her adoption back months if the wrong choice is made. If a woman chooses to be honest and the social worker is unwilling to lie, then the woman must find another social worker and start the process again. “It’s more feasible if you’re single,” says Epstein. “You don’t get defined by your sexual orientation in the same way and it’s easier to not talk about that.”

Indeed, there are those within Canada’s tight-knight LGBT adoption community who feel that the less said about queers and international adoption the better. Many blame U.S. media coverage of queer adoptive parents as being instrumental in China’s decision to ban single women from adopting. As awareness of the issue grows in diplomatic circles, they say, more consulates close their doors, shutting off the few remaining channels available for women seeking this route to parenthood. One Canadian adoption advocate refused to be interviewed for this article and strongly discouraged publishing any story at all on the subject.

There are no easy answers to a problem of such emotional, legal, and cultural complexity. For Canadian social workers, having to lie about sexual orientation in a homestudy report is a serious dilemma. “That’s unethical; I would never do that,” says Poplack. “It’s tough sometimes, because some of the rules you think are really unfair. I think we have to respect other countries—but it’s really crappy for gays and lesbians.”

Lisa made the decision to out herself to her adoption practitioner after her adoption was finalized and, as a social worker herself, she has spent a long time thinking about the ethical implications of her decision. “How do you reconcile that you are going against our Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Okay, it is the other country’s rules—but they’re homophobic and they go against our codes. Social workers haven’t been able to work it out in a way that enables most of them to feel comfortable,” says Lisa. “So the people who are doing it are like the people who work as social workers for Catholic charities and then pass condoms out under the table; they’re basically doing it very quietly, very silently, afraid themselves to come out.”

The Loblaws seminar draws to a close. Everyone stands to put on their coats, wrapping scarves around their necks. The music drifting in from the grocery store has changed to the Beach Boys. Shirin thinks she may not adopt. “I can’t lie about this fact,” she says. “The homestudy is going to be really one-to-one, close work between me and the social worker or case worker, and that is going to be based on trust. The person should know about me, should know about my past, should know about my family, should know about everything. How is it going to be possible to not say such a big fact?” She’ll do some more research and talk to a friend who is also looking into inter-country adoption, but she’s still skeptical. Shirin did not come out as gay until later in her life, and after being closeted for so long she doesn’t want to be in that situation again. “I don’t approve of it; to lie about it,” she says. “You should be honest.”

Lisa, however, is contemplating adopting another child from Haiti. She will need to find a new social worker, one who doesn’t know she’s gay. Then she’ll undergo another homestudy, closeted again, but she’s willing to do it for another child. “I think I’m a seasoned pro now at it,” she says. “I’ve guided other people about how to do it; I can do it myself again and I’ve been through it once so it’s not as scary.” When she thinks back to the emotional toll of concealing her sexuality the first time, she reflects, “I never really lost connection to who I was as a person; I was just playing the game.”

It is a game that Shirin and countless other queer women may simply decide not to play.

Sally Rhoads. Illustration by Antony Hare.

Sally Rhoads is passionate about surrogacy. The 32-year-old mother of three (ages 12, seven and 10 months) lives near Stratford, Ontario. She has been a successful surrogate once and an unsuccessful one nine times. Although her commitment to surrogacy almost killed her, she remains an advocate for a practice that is highly restricted in Canada and banned in some U.S. states.

This: When did you first become interested in surrogacy?

Rhoads: After my first child in 1999. I had really enjoyed being pregnant and found it was easy for me. I was on the internet and came across some surrogacy boards. I realized there were a lot of couples that needed help having a baby. So I figured that’s one thing I know I can do.

This: At that time it wasn’t illegal in Canada to take money for surrogacy [it now is although “altruistic surrogacy” is permitted, except in Quebec where all surrogacy is banned]. Were you also motivated by money?

Rhoads: I just thought it was something you do, like organ donations. I wasn’t financially motivated whatsoever.

This: How did your husband feel about surrogacy?

Rhoads: He didn’t like the idea very much at the beginning because he didn’t understand it. When he learned it would be a gestational surrogacy, where I would be carrying an embryo created by the intended mother’s eggs and father’s sperm, their genetics, he decided it was OK.

This: How long after your child was born did you consider surrogacy?

Rhoads: Three months.

This: How did you choose a couple to help?

Rhoads: Through the internet. From March 1999 through September, I had more than 200 emails from couples, pretty well all from the U.S. I went with Heather and Sergey from Maryland. They said they would take care of all my expenses, including travel.

This: But you were eventually paid.

Rhoads: Much later, when we started talking about a contract; they brought it up. That’s what you do, especially in the U.S. You pay a monthly fee. Maybe $2,500 in the U.S. and $1,700 or $2,000 in Canada. For me it didn’t matter. They threw out $1,100, plus expenses. That was fine with us.

This: How was the pregnancy?

Rhoads: I had the embryo transfer in a clinic in New Jersey in April 2000. When I got pregnant, I got so sick my family doctor urged me to get an abortion. The morning sickness was so bad I ended up losing my job. I also got an infection from all the needles you have to inject yourself with. It felt as if I had the flu every day for months.

This: Did you start to wonder if you had made the right decision?

Rhoads: No. Never.

This: How did the rest of the pregnancy go?

Rhoads: We learned there were twins—actually, it had started out as triplets—so the sickness then made sense. They had to induce me at 37 weeks. So the birth was in Stratford, and Heather and Sergey weren’t there for it. They were both breech babies. And there was a prolapsed cord [where the umbilical cord emerges from the uterus before the fetus]. I ended up having a C-section. I had a boy and a girl, Peter and Victoria.

This: A question I’m sure you’re often asked is whether it was difficult to give up the babies.

Rhoads: Not at all. Heather had been with me through all the testing. The day they put the embryos in me she held my hand and cried the whole time. Right from that point, you see that those aren’t your children at all. So for me there was a huge detachment there.

This: How many more times did you act as a surrogate?

Rhoads: Nine.

This: Did any succeed?

Rhoads: No.

This: Do you know why?

Rhoads: Embryo problems…at the couple’s end.

This: Why did you keep trying?

Rhoads: I never really wanted to do another surrogacy. But the couples would have the worst stories imaginable. One couple had spent $150,000 on IVF. They had lost their home, everything, trying to have a baby. They would plead with me to help them, and I always relented. One, in 2005, almost killed me. I had just had a miscarriage from another surrogacy and I told myself I was through. But a couple came from China. They had lost three babies. They said “please put our last embryos in you.” How could I say no? They put three embryos in me and I got pregnant. A couple of weeks later I was bleeding and they said it looks as if you miscarried, and that was the end of it. A week later I was feeling awful. I went to the hospital and my blood pressure was almost not there. Lo and behold, I had twin babies in my left tube. They had gotten between the tube and the ovary, and I got a big clot and it had ruptured. I lost half my blood and needed emergency surgery. They said I would have died if I hadn’t come in.

This: So that was the last surrogacy?

Rhoads: No. I had three more transfers after that.

This: When was your last try?

Rhoads: January 2008. I’m retired now. I’m divorced and my new partner wants to have more children and is worried that surrogacy might prevent that. I’ve already lost a fallopian tube because of it.

This: Have your views of surrogacy changed at all over the years?

Rhoads: In some ways. Altruistic surrogacy is very idealistic. I don’t really agree with it anymore. I strongly believe compensation should be involved unless it’s like your sister or a relative you have a connection with. I’ve seen a lot of surrogates go through this with altruistic ideas and come out of it feeling very used and hurt at the end. Most couples don’t want any connection with you after the birth. When you’re pregnant and you have your own baby, you come home with a baby. When you’re a surrogate you come home to nothing, not so much as a picture.

This: Is that what happened with Heather and Sergey?

Rhoads: No. But they got divorced a couple of years later. And I wondered, God, what I went through for these people, and they didn’t even stick together. Heather and I became close and we still talk almost every week. The twins [who are 10] know all about me. They think it was neat they were born in Canada. They added me as friends on Facebook.

This: What did you get out of surrogacy?

Rhoads: I loved it. I was always so happy to find out I was pregnant for a couple. And I always felt so cheated if I couldn’t help them. I guess, for me, it was almost addictive.