Born into debt

I didn't get started on this line of thought because of Wikipedia; it actually started because of a link that Corky sent me about an Indian woman who gave birth to twins at the age of 70. "When do women go into menopause in India?!" I thought. Apparently, whenever they run out of oocytes, which aside from being my new favorite word, and aside from not being present in my spell checker's dictionary, is the term for an egg cell that hasn't dropped from the ovary yet. Guess she had a lot of egg cells! Maybe she just started late or something.

Reading into the article, however, it turns out that she didn't get pregnant naturally. Because she had in vitro fertilization (IVF), she didn't necessarily have to have her own egg, and the article didn't specify that was the case. It's possible that she was impregnated with an egg from someone else, which would permit her to be pregnant even after going through menopause.

The real reason that I'm interested enough in this article to blog about it, however, is not anything I read about it on Wikipedia. The couple, a 77 year old man and a 70 year old woman, decided that they needed her to get pregnant in order to have a male heir for their family farm. Never mind that they already have two adult daughters and 5 grandchildren, they need a male child of their own to pass on their belongings to. From the article:

“We kept no stone unturned and God has rewarded us. The treatment cost me a fortune but the birth of a son makes it all worthwhile. I can die a happy man and a proud father.”

Nice. Because those daughters that you've had are just females. How much of a fortune did he spend in order to become blessed? He

"mortgaged his land, sold his buffaloes, spent his life savings and took out a credit card loan to finance the treatment."

So now you have a male son and heir. You'll leave him your mortgaged land. He won't be able to farm that land because he doesn't have a buffalo, he won't be able to buy one because he doesn't have any savings, and he won't be able to get a loan because his credit's already maxxed out paying off your IVF treatment. Lucky him!

Even that isn't why I'm blogging about. That's just one extremely poor choice for one unlucky kid. What really struck me about that article is that we're doing that to an entire generation with our deficit spending.