There’s a particular brand of quiet devastation that comes wrapped in a compliment. Someone, usually at a baby shower I was guilted into attending, will tilt their head, gesture at my daughter, and say, “She’s just so natural.” The word hangs in the air between us, a little grenade of good intentions. What they mean, of course, is that she’s beautiful, unposed, perhaps currently smearing avocado into her hair with the kind of feral joy only a toddler can muster. But what I hear is a taxonomy. A sorting. A line drawn in the sandbox of procreation.
I am Jenna Luisa Ferrer, and my family tree is a Frankenstein’s monster of love, science, and a frankly shocking amount of paperwork. My daughter was conceived via IVF, using donor eggs, after my own ovaries decided to retire early, presumably to pursue a life of leisure I was not invited to. Before her, there were miscarriages, there were timed injections in gas station bathrooms, there was a lot of weeping into overpriced fertility smoothies. And through it all, there was the language. The relentless, maddening, utterly absurd language of “natural” versus “artificial” family building.
The Ghost in the Machine of My Womb
Let’s start with the big one: “natural conception.” The phrase is a linguistic magic trick. It conjures images of a candlelit bedroom, a bottle of organic wine, two people dissolving into a puddle of pure, unmediated biological destiny. No spreadsheets, no syringes, no embryologists with impressive eyebrows peering through a microscope. It sounds so simple, so inevitable. It’s a story we tell ourselves about how life is supposed to begin.
But here’s the darkly funny part: for so many of us, the “natural” way was a complete and utter failure. My body, that supposed temple of earthy womanhood, was less a sacred birthing vessel and more a hostile work environment for embryos. My husband’s sperm, bless their little determined tails, were fine. The problem was my eggs, which apparently aged in dog years. So, we turned to the “artificial.” We outsourced the genetic material to a generous stranger, created life in a petri dish, and I carried that life in my body, fed it with my blood, birthed it through my own immense, screaming effort. Tell me again which part of that was artificial. Was it the love? The pain? The stretch marks that now map my abdomen like a topographic chart of a war I won?
The word “artificial” suggests something fake, a cheap imitation. Fake flowers. Artificial sweetener with its cloying, chemical aftertaste. Yet the child who throws her entire body weight against my shins when I try to drink a cup of coffee is the most real thing I have ever experienced. Her tantrums are not synthetic. The way she says “Mama” is not a simulation. The language we use to describe her origin is a clumsy, violent shorthand that erases the entire sweaty, miraculous reality of her existence.
The “Own” Goal of Genetic Narcissism
Then we get to the qualifiers. “Your own child.” A phrase most often deployed by people who have never had to confront the concept of genetic material that isn’t theirs. I was once asked, by a well-meaning relative, if I was worried I wouldn’t love a baby who wasn’t “my own.” I smiled, the kind of smile that stretches your lips over your teeth in a way that could be mistaken for warmth but is actually a survival mechanism to prevent you from biting someone. I thought about the embryo transfer, the little flash of light on the ultrasound, the sheer, desperate hope I felt. Was that hope not mine? Was the body I built for her, cell by cell, calcium theft and all, not my own?
This obsession with genetic ownership is a special kind of madness. We have created a hierarchy of parental love, with “biological” at the top, a rung below it for “adoptive,” and a confusing, misty middle ground for people like me who are gestational carriers but not genetic sources. It’s a system designed to make some families feel like they are wearing a counterfeit label. I remember sitting in a support group, surrounded by women who were all grappling with donor conception, and one woman whispered, “I feel like a photocopy of a mother.” The room let out a collective, pained exhale. We had all felt it. That insidious fear that our love was a knock-off, a synthetic fiber in a world that demands pure silk.
The Fertility Industrial Complex and Its Ugly Jargon
It’s not just the laypeople with their casual cruelty. The medical machine itself speaks in a dialect of dehumanization. I was often referred to as a “poor responder.” Not a woman with a name and a history and a desperate, aching heart, but a malfunctioning machine that didn’t react properly to the input of drugs. My uterus was “hostile,” my eggs were “geriatric,” my cervical mucus was, apparently, “scant.” I’ve been called many things in my life, but “scant” is a new low. You start to feel like a piece of faulty equipment being discussed by weary mechanics.
And then there are the acronyms. TTC, ART, IVF, ICSI, DE, PGS. A whole alphabet soup of grief. You find yourself living in a world where a “chemical pregnancy” is a thing, a phrase so brutally clinical it reduces the loss of a brief, bright hope to a lab error. “Spontaneous abortion” is another gem—a term that sounds like a fetus just decided to up and quit on a whim. “Oh, I’m just going to spontaneously abort this one. Not feeling it.” The language is sterilized, stripped of emotion, precisely because the emotions are too big. If we called a miscarriage what it feels like—a soul-shattering, body-betraying cataclysm—the doctors would never get through their afternoon rounds.
When “Trying” Becomes a Competitive Sport
The phrase “just relax, and it will happen naturally” deserves its own circle of hell. It is a piece of advice so breathtakingly stupid it should be considered a form of assault. It implies that infertility is a failure of chill, a personal shortcoming in the zen department. It ignores the blocked tubes, the absent sperm, the genetic translocations, the entire brutal, physical reality of what’s actually going on. I was once told this by a woman who got pregnant on her honeymoon by looking at her husband. She meant well. They always do. But the subtext is a poison: your body is failing because your mind is wrong. You are not enough of a natural woman.
And on the flip side, there’s the bizarre sanctification of suffering for the “artificial” route. “You must want it so much to go through all that.” As if the “natural” parents don’t want it. As if desire is measured in needle sticks and transvaginal ultrasounds. It creates a perverse competition where the more you suffer, the more valid your claim to the child. I have caught myself doing it, listing my reproductive trauma like a resume: one surgery, three IUIs, two miscarriages, one egg donor, and a partridge in a pear tree. Look at my credentials! Validate my motherhood! It’s a sickness. The child is not a trophy you win for enduring the most pain.
Rewriting the Script
So what do we do with this dumpster fire of a lexicon? I’ve started to become a linguistic vigilante, one awkward conversation at a time. When someone asks if my daughter is “my own,” I now say, “She is the product of a massive collaborative art project involving a wonderful woman in California, a brilliant doctor in New York, and my exceptionally hospitable uterus.” It usually shuts them up. Or it opens a door. Sometimes, a woman’s eyes will flicker with recognition, and she’ll lean in and whisper, “We used donor sperm.” A secret sisterhood of the “artificial.”
We need new words, or maybe we need to reclaim the old ones. What is more “natural” than a species doing whatever it takes to survive and reproduce? Crows use tools. Bees build complex, geometric cities. I used a catheter and a freezer. It’s all just biology with different levels of assistance. My daughter is not a science experiment; she is a human girl who loves blueberries and has a terrifyingly accurate dinosaur roar. Her origin story is not a shameful secret to be coded in hushed, clinical terms. It is a story of persistence, of technology, of a profound act of faith and community.
The darkness in this is real, and I will not sanitize it. The grief of not having a genetic connection can hit me at odd moments—seeing a father’s eyes in a child’s face, a mother’s smile. There is a specific, lonely mourning for a biological link that will never exist. But that grief is not the whole story. It sits next to the absurd, cosmic joy of it all. I didn’t “get over” infertility by having a baby; I just added a new, louder set of demands to my existing pile of existential dread. The language needs to hold both. The “natural” and the “artificial” are not opposites; they are dance partners in a very strange, chaotic ballet, and someone always ends up stepping on someone else’s foot.
Ultimately, the label on the family-building tin can is irrelevant. What matters is the content, the messy, screaming, hilarious, mundane reality inside the house. I am not an artificial mother. I am just a mother, covered in Play-Doh and existential exhaustion, which is, I suspect, the most natural state of all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn’t it just semantics? Why get so worked up over words?
Because language shapes reality. When we call one form of conception “natural,” we implicitly label other forms as “unnatural.” For a child born via donor or IVF, that framing can plant a seed of otherness from day one. It’s not about being politically correct; it’s about dismantling a hierarchy that puts pain and secrecy on certain families. Words are the first bricks in the house of identity you build for a child, and I’d rather not start with faulty materials.
What should I say instead of “natural” when I mean a pregnancy happened without medical assistance?
I’m a fan of saying exactly what you mean, which is usually just “conceived without ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology)” if the distinction is medically necessary. In casual conversation, you could just say “We didn’t need a doctor’s help.” But honestly, ask yourself why you need to know. If you’re just making small talk, the conception method is deeply personal. A better question is almost always, “How are you feeling?” or just, “Congratulations.” Focus on the human in front of you, not the mechanics of how they got there.
I used donor eggs/sperm and I still struggle with the feeling that my child isn’t fully “mine.” Does that feeling ever go away?
It morphs. At least it did for me. The fear that you’re a “photocopy mother” is a ghost that lives in the room with you for a while. It fades when your child is screaming because you cut their toast wrong, and you realize no amount of shared DNA would make that moment any more or less parenting. It pops back up on Mother’s Day or during genetics units in school. But the lived, daily love—the thousand little rituals and memories you forge—eventually becomes a louder, more permanent story than the biological one. Grief for a genetic link can coexist with complete, ferocious, undeniable knowledge that this child is yours. You aren’t a copy. You are the original, primary, one-and-only mother of this specific, messy human.