There’s a specific violence to the word “natural” when it lands on a body like mine. I felt it first under the fluorescent glare of a supermarket aisle, eight months pregnant but not showing in a way a stranger could clock. A woman bumped my cart with hers and asked, “Is it a natural pregnancy?” She meant well, I think. She meant: Was there sex? Was it spontaneous? Did you do it the way people in perfume ads do it? I could have told her about the needles, the timed intercourse that felt like a NASA launch sequence, the embryo frozen for three years before it became the girl now kicking my ribs. Instead, I said, “No, it’s supernatural. We summoned her through a portal.” The woman laughed, nervous, and pushed her cart toward the dairy case. I stood there, a failed witch, a successful science experiment, and I started to understand that the language we use for how families come to be isn’t just sloppy. It’s a quiet, ongoing referendum on who counts as real.
I’m Jenna Luisa Ferrer, and I’ve built my family with the help of reproductive technology, adoption paperwork, and a stubbornness my mother calls “unladylike.” I’m also the kind of person who cries at the ending of Paddington 2 and burns toast with religious consistency. I’m not a medical marvel. I’m a mother. And still, the world keeps handing me a vocabulary that splits my experience into two piles: the one that counts and the one that doesn’t.
The Ghost in the Adjective
“Natural” is a word we pretend is neutral. It sits in prenatal vitamins and birthing classes and the well-meaning questions of relatives who want to know if you did it “the old-fashioned way.” But the old-fashioned way, historically speaking, includes a lot of death. Maternal mortality, infant loss, infertility that was simply called fate. The word acts like it’s about biology, but it’s always about morality. A “natural” conception is pure, unmeddled, blessed. An “artificial” one is Frankenstein’s monster, a cold room full of pipettes, a doctor who gets paid too much. The split is so baked into the language we barely notice we’re serving judgment alongside the birth announcement.
I started noticing it when my daughter was three. A friend from a playgroup, a woman I actually liked, said, “It must be so different, bonding with a child who isn’t biologically yours.” My daughter is biologically mine. She grew in my uterus. She shares my genetic material. But she was conceived through IVF with donor eggs, and in my friend’s mind, that made me a kind of surrogate for my own life. The irony: nobody asks a father who used donor sperm if he feels like a real dad. The language of suspicion is reserved for mothers. We’re the ones whose bodies get held up to the light and examined for signs of cheating.
The Infertility Confessional
If you’ve gone through fertility treatment, you know about the compulsory confession. It’s the moment someone asks an innocent question—“Are you hoping for another?”—and you have to decide how much of your medical file to dump onto the picnic blanket. I used to overexplain. I’d recite my follicle counts, my miscarriage dates, the exact pH of my husband’s semen as if I were a very unsexy sommelier. I did this because I thought transparency would buy me absolution. If they knew how hard I’d worked, maybe they’d grant me the title of “real mother.”
But the absolution never comes. Because the logic of the “natural” framework is religious, not rational. You can’t earn your way out of it with suffering. There’s always another test: Did you carry the baby yourself? Did you use your own eggs? Did you try acupuncture first? Did you pray? The questions are a funnel, and at the bottom is a tiny, impossible standard: a conception that happened without thought, without effort, without the indignity of a transvaginal wand. I’ve met women who conceived on a first date and felt guilty about it. I’ve met women who spent six figures on treatments and still felt like frauds. The shame is a cloud that rains on everyone.
Adoption and the Language of Rescue
My son came to us through adoption, and with him came a whole new glossary of terrible phrases. “Real parents.” “Own child.” “Gift.” I am his real parent, and I’m also his real parent who once spent forty-five minutes looking for his shoes while he sat on the floor eating a cracker he found under the couch. That’s a level of mundane devotion no biology can guarantee. The “gift” language is worse. It frames adoption as a transaction where a baby is handed over by one woman to another, wrapped in gratitude. But my son’s birth mother did not give me a gift. She made an impossibly hard choice inside a set of circumstances I’ll never fully grasp. Calling it a gift erases her grief. It also implies my son is an object that can be given, rather than a person who has his own story, his own losses, his own right to be angry about all of it someday.
We talk about adoption as if it’s a rescue mission. “You saved him,” people say, and I want to scream. He saved me from a life that was smaller than the one I have now. He isn’t a before-and-after photo. He’s a child who likes dinosaurs and hates the texture of mashed potatoes and will someday have to integrate a narrative that began before he could speak. My job isn’t to be his savior. It’s to be his mother, which means being a witness to his whole truth, even the parts that hurt.
The Artificiality of It All
Let’s talk about “artificial.” The word comes from the Latin artificialis, meaning “made by art.” And if there’s anything I’ve learned from building a family in the cracks of the expected, it’s that there is a great deal of art involved. The lab technicians who selected the embryo that became my daughter weren’t robots. They were people who went home at night and worried about their own parents and forgot to buy milk. The social workers who handled our adoption paperwork weren’t cogs in a machine. They were exhausted and underpaid and still managed to show up with a strange, bureaucratic compassion I now think of as its own kind of love.
Every family is made by art. The art of showing up, of choosing each other over and over, of learning the specific way a child likes their toast cut and then doing it that way for a decade. The biological act of conception is the least interesting part of parenthood. It’s a spark. The fire is everything that comes after. I have a friend who got pregnant on her honeymoon, a story she tells with a shrug, because what she really wants to talk about is the son who has autism and the years she spent learning his language. That’s the art. That’s the making. The rest is just plumbing.
Rebuilding the Vocabulary
I’ve started to correct people, not with anger but with a kind of tired precision. When someone says “natural child,” I say, “You mean biological?” Because a child conceived in a petri dish is still a natural child. She still sneezes sunlight and cries when she’s overtired and draws pictures of our family with crayons that make my head look like a potato. When someone asks if my son is “my own,” I say, “He is himself. I’m lucky he shares some of that with me.” The reframing is small, but it’s a start. Language is a muscle. You have to exercise it until the new shape feels natural—which is funny, given the topic.
I think often about what we lose when we cling to the natural/artificial binary. We lose the ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. A woman who carries a pregnancy after years of loss is not a medical miracle; she’s a person who went through something hard and got to the other side. A father who adopts a teenager from the child welfare system is not a hero; he’s a man who decided to parent a specific human being at a specific moment. The stories aren’t less sacred because they involve lawyers or injections or checks written to agencies. They’re sacred because they involve a promise. The promise is the same, no matter how you get to the starting line: I will take care of you. I will fail sometimes. I will keep going anyway.
The Dark Humor of Survival
Here’s the part where I’m supposed to be inspiring. I’m not inspiring. I’m a woman who once sobbed in a fertility clinic bathroom because the automatic faucet wouldn’t recognize my hands, and I took it as a sign from God that I wasn’t meant to be a mother. That’s not inspiring; it’s deranged. But it’s also funny, in the way horror is funny when you’ve got enough distance. The language of “natural” family building would have me treat that moment as a shameful secret. Instead, I tell it at parties. It’s my party trick. I watch people’s faces shift from discomfort to recognition. Because so many of us have been there, in the bathroom, feeling unworthy of something that was never about worth in the first place.
I’m not against the word “natural.” I’m against its weaponization. I use it to describe my daughter’s ability to find the one mud puddle in a parking lot. I use it to describe the way my son’s laugh bubbles up from his belly like a spring. Those things are natural. The way they came to me is beside the point. The point is that they’re here, and I’m here, and we’re a family—messy and complicated and fully, completely real.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it offensive to ask someone how they built their family?
It depends entirely on context and relationship. If you’re a close friend or family member, a gentle, open-ended question like “I’d love to hear your story, if you’re open to sharing” can be welcome. If you’re an acquaintance or stranger, it’s usually better to let the person offer the information themselves. For many people, these stories involve loss, trauma, or medical detail they don’t want to discuss casually. A good rule: ask yourself if you’d be comfortable describing your own reproductive history in response. If the answer is no, reconsider the question.
What terms should I use instead of “natural” and “artificial” when talking about conception?
More accurate and neutral terms include “spontaneous conception” for a pregnancy that occurred without medical assistance, and “assisted reproduction” or “medically assisted conception” for pregnancies involving treatments like IVF or IUI. When discussing parent-child relationships, “biological parent” and “non-biological parent” are clearer than “real” or “natural” parent. For adoption, simply saying “adopted child” or “child by adoption” is factual without implying a hierarchy of legitimacy.
Why does the language around family building matter so much?
Language shapes how we think, and the words “natural” and “artificial” carry heavy moral connotations. When we call one path to parenthood “natural,” we imply the other paths are unnatural, lesser, or suspect. This can cause real harm: it contributes to the shame and isolation felt by many people who use fertility treatment, donor conception, surrogacy, or adoption. Using precise, neutral language helps create a culture where all family stories are honored, and children don’t grow up feeling like their origins need to be explained away.