Well, folks, she’s done it again. An oracle of our age, a woman whose uttered wisdom exceeds the limitations of her public persona, Paris Hilton purchased another child and has interesting insights.
The assertion that the hotel heiress bought her progeny may be deemed “harsh,” but it’s also accurate. For reasons of preference, Paris opted to pay someone to gestate a child for her again. What 20 years ago would have been considered science fiction is now mainstream and widely available: surrogacy, the commercial enterprise of bearing children.
In response to the anticipated accusation of “harshness,” I will point to a word I recently came across: “dysphemism.” Great word! While we have all heard about and encountered regularly its opposite, euphemism, dysphemism is not usually given a name, though its rhetorical power does not go unnoticed.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein explains the power of dysphemism. First, it’s worth getting reacquainted with euphemism. He notes, “H.W. Fowler’s brief entry on euphemism in his excellent ‘Modern English Usage’ reads: a ‘mild or vague or periphrastic expression as a substitute for blunt precision or disagreeable truth.’” Euphemisms are ubiquitous in an age that cares deeply for people’s feelings; blunt truths much harder to come by.
In contrast to euphemism, dysphemism emphasizes the unpleasant facts, the angle most likely to make the listener or reader squirm. Epstein writes, “I had a friend, now long gone, whose speech was larded with dysphemisms. Of Jewish academics, some among them famous, who attempted to pass themselves off as gentiles, he would say ‘At least X has never taken advantage of being Jewish.’” First, may we commend the use of the word “larded”? Next, it goes without saying that this kind of speech can get mean. But it can also lay bare the contradictions and subtleties that are worth examining.
Now that I have used a word here-to-fore unfamiliar to me and justified my disagreeable comments thus, let us see what Paris has to say about her reasons for paying someone for the use of her womb. According to Paris, unfortunate circumstances in the teen years led to a debilitating fear of doctor’s offices and exams. For this reason, she was unwilling to become pregnant.
Additionally—and here’s where it gets telling—she claims, “When I was in The Simple Life [television show], I had to be in a room when a woman was giving birth and that traumatised me as well. But I want a family so bad, it’s just the physical part of doing it. I’m just so scared… childbirth and death are the two things that scare me more than anything in the world.”
“Childbirth and death,” the liminal spaces of our earthly existence. How fascinating to connect them so succinctly and yet miss the glaring problem. You can pay someone to give birth for you in a limited sense, but can you pay someone to die for you? As of yet, you cannot.
The terrifying end of refusing to accept death, as so many of us refuse to accept birth, is to take your death into your own hands, determine the when and the how and the why. That is the only grim control we can exert control over the inevitable. A culture unwilling to bear the burden of new life is one both clinging most desperately to life and the most suicidal, willing to throw away an unearned gift in order to maintain an illusion of control.
That may sound wildly out of proportion to Paris Hilton’s comments, but her identifying the locus of her fear (birth and death) gets to the heart of our sickness. As our fear of life and desire for control grow, we farm out the nurturing of our offspring to paid laborers and we expand who is eligible for state-sanctioned death. There is, dare we say, a vital connection.
And what about the relationship of birth and caring for children? Is “the physical part” separate from all the rest of it? Adoption is possible, yes, but can there be a meaningful connection between the inconvenience and discomfort of bearing children and the virtues necessary to nurture them beyond the womb? We can view pregnancy and birth not as an unrelated medical event but as a potent preparatory stage for motherhood. Opening ourselves up to life requires surrender to a force we cannot control.
A mother whose baby died shortly after birth of a congenital heart condition prayed for her dead son’s healing. As she prayed she was gripped not by hope but by terror, the realization that there is a force beyond us capable of making the dead live. Absent the life force, we are all dead. There is something—the Chrisitan would say Someone—outside us, acting on us continually to sustain us in being.
Most of us will not face life and death in such an unvarnished moment as the mother of the dead baby, but all of us experience the realization of our littleness, our vulnerability and dependence. As parents have children, they are met with the realization that they cannot control the outcomes; we can direct and coordinate to the best of our ability, but as children multiply there is a teetering toward chaos that should chasten us. Giving birth was only the first faltering step, relatively easy compared to what is asked of us after that.
How often does the family of a newborn return to the hospital with another child whose head has been gashed open on concrete, a child stricken with appendicitis, a child mangled by a fall on a slide that has been played on countless times before that day? The answer sure feels like often. Something about the new baby coming into the family destabilizes. Everyone is tired, disequilibrated, inhibitions are not what they would usually be. Illness and accidents capitalize on our weakness. To be open to life is to be vulnerable.
That life force, growing in the womb, gathering potential energy like a coiled spring, bursts forth with an immense power for growth and resilience and a shocking possibility of hurt, harm, and destruction.
In her perennially meditative little book “The Reed of God,” Caryll Houselander makes the same connection as Paris (with a bit more meaningful cosmic perspective), writing, “We are afraid of birth, of life, of pain, of loss, of death.” Houselander continues, “All through our life we are dogged with fear. Some fears knit us together in sympathy, make us aware of our dependence upon one another.” Ideally, the realization of our fear is an opportunity for closer kinship, not an opportunity to exploit someone else.
Elaborating, Houselander writes, “We are afraid of life, of its continual demand on us, of its continual challenge to us: we are afraid of pain, of sickness, and of the pains and sickness of others.”
Where do we turn in our fear. Houselander notes, “Most of us trust finite, helpless creatures more than they trust God, and this for the oddest of reasons—namely, that the finite, helpless creature is as they are; both are clinging to the same false securities.”
If we have eyes to see it, there is everywhere evidence of our dependence and the precarious nature of our lives. In times of health, that realization should propel us to embrace more of life, to drink it in and savor it. Instead, the isolated and overwhelmed try with futility to control, to cordon off bits of being cobbled together out of fear. It is not always directly about having a child or not. Those decisions, after all, don’t always come down to us. There are countless ways we invite life in or shut it out, convinced that more people, more activity, and more energy will be the end of us. It’s almost always the opposite.
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