The Children We Think We Want

It started with a tweet. On March 24, someone wrote:

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie using a surrogate to get twin boys is ridiculously disappointing.”

It was blunt, maybe even unfair, but it stuck with me.

Later, I read the interview where she confirmed it. She had twin boys through surrogacy. She didn’t owe anyone an explanation, but there it was. It made me pause, not just because of who she is, but because of what it said about where we are now. What we expect from women. What we think motherhood should look like. What we're willing to judge when it doesn’t.

I’ve watched someone close to me carry and deliver a child. I saw the fear, the exhaustion, the risk. I've also spent time reading about frozen embryos, gene-edited babies born in secret (He Jiankui’s CRISPR twins, born in China in 2018, remain the world’s only known case), and six-figure nannies raising other people’s kids. And in the middle of all that, I’ve been sitting with my own thoughts, trying to figure out what parenthood even means today. Who gets to be a parent, who’s left out, and what we’re all becoming in the process.

It’s easy to talk about reproductive technology like it’s just a medical thing: IVF, gene editing, surrogacy. But there’s nothing abstract about trying to conceive, or carrying a baby, or giving birth. It’s physical. It’s terrifying. It’s sacred. And for some people, it’s just not possible, or it comes with pain they’re not willing to go through again. That part rarely shows up in the cultural conversation. We skip to the politics, the science, the “shoulds.”

Then I read The Embryo Question, a New York Times series that begins with the writer getting a call from her fertility clinic on the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned. Seven of her fertilized eggs had made it to the blastocyst stage. The next day, one was transferred into her uterus. The others were frozen. Suddenly, she wasn’t just pregnant. She was responsible for six more embryos, at a moment when the country was rethinking what “potential life” means.

The image that stuck with me was this: holding one baby while six others wait in storage. It reminded me just how weird and fragile life can be, especially when science gets involved. We think tech will save us from uncertainty, but it often just gives us a different kind. Today, embryos are ranked, selected, discarded, or preserved indefinitely. Companies are marketing tools to help parents assess which embryos have the lowest risk scores for conditions like heart disease, depression, and lower intelligence. But I keep wondering if we’re still trying to have kids, or if we’re just trying to get it right.

II.

And then comes the question no one really talks about: after all that, after the embryo, the transfer, the pregnancy, the birth, what kind of parents are we becoming?

Right after finishing the NYT series, I read The Six-Figure Nannies and Housekeepers of Palm Beach by Emily Witt. On the surface, it’s about private household staff, but it’s really about parenting in elite families. Families with two nannies working in shifts, a chef, a house manager. Children growing up in environments where every emotion is managed by someone on payroll.

There’s nothing wrong with help. Every parent needs it. But when parenting becomes something that’s outsourced, systematized even, it raises different questions. What are we teaching our kids when everything is optimized for efficiency and status? When conscious discipline and Montessori methods come from the nanny, not the parent?

I’m not romanticizing struggle here. But I do think about people I know raising kids without the money, without the time, who still show up with messy, flawed, real love. Kids who cry on public buses, who are told “no” without explanation, who learn how to be okay with not being the center of the universe. That kind of parenting doesn’t make headlines, but it makes humans.

What I noticed reading both pieces, about embryos and elite households, is how much of modern parenting seems to be about control. Control over how children are conceived, born, raised, and socialized. We say we want curious, kind, resilient kids. But the way we’re doing it, through gene selection, curated households, and carefully choreographed childhoods, feels more about perfection than presence.

And that’s a problem. Because if wealth keeps shaping how families are formed and how children are raised, then inequality starts way before school or college. It begins in the womb. Maybe even before that, in the embryo storage tank. One group gets the best science, the best care, the best nannies. Another is told to be grateful just to make it through pregnancy. That’s not just a healthcare gap. It’s a future gap.

I don’t have the answers. I’m still figuring out how I feel about all of this. But I think we need to slow down and ask: what kind of world are we building for these children we say we want? And are we becoming the kind of parents they actually need?

This version started as a journal entry after reading a tweet. It’s raw, reflective, and written to help me think through what it means to become a parent in a world that’s reengineering life itself. I read:

I also read about Orchid Health and other startups pushing reproductive tech further than I thought we’d ever go. Reproductive tech has moved faster than regulation, faster than public understanding, and sometimes faster than ethics can keep up.

And yes, I saw someone close to me go through childbirth. It shook me. It’s part of why this isn’t just theory for me.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I wrote this to think out loud, not to preach. If it helped you pause, or question something, or see this moment a little differently, I’m grateful.