The Confusing Semantics Of Pregnancy

The word "gave" does a lot of lifting here.

The only way to do these types of posts and not fall down a personalized rabbit hole of resentment is to throw out some anecdotes and quippy stories off the top, so I will do that here.

The second time my wife and I did IVF, it also failed, much as it did the first time. Yay. Well, we found out that one failed in Fiji, which kinda sorta lessens the blow therein.

A couple of weeks after we got back, we talked to some geneticist and the fertility doctor involved in that round. This was an interesting conversation for a few different reasons, none of which I will deeply elaborate on here, as some of it is personal. However, both the geneticist and the fertility doctor, in potential God complex moments, kept talking about other people (not by name, i.e. HIPPA violations) and saying they “gave” them children. It was said so many times on this one phone call that I started to break out in hives a little bit.

I guess fundamentally, the word “gave” in that situation is true. If you struggle to conceive naturally and then you go to a doctor and that works out, the doctor in some ways did give you that child. I think it’s a little more complicated than that on many levels, but I guess at the base level the word is accurate.

Now, I’ve also seen about 20 years of Father’s Day posts at this point. I don’t really dabble in the IG so much anymore, but I’ve been on and off the Book of Faces for a decade and a half. One of the most prevalent words in a Father’s Day post is “gave,” i.e.: