on champagne

In Saturday’s G&M, which I read on Sunday, as is my custom, Karen Von Hahn opined about champagne complaints. Things like “champagne has become so popular that production within the snobby confines of Champagne cannot meet demand, and, alas!, the delicate demarcation must be expanded, boo hoo.” Or, you know, whining that your child only got into four med schools, but not U of T.

Living a half-hour from Niagara for three years, and with a woman who likes to celebrate so consistently that we’d even pop a bottle to mark the occasion of getting our dog’s hair cut, I developed a tongue for bubbly. Doused in local bitter ale since my last provincial emigration, I can’t honestly count myself among the wine snobs anymore. My champagne complaint is that I lease such a sprawling flat, with such generously high ceilings and expansive antique windows, that I simply can’t heat the place. It’s not possible to get it warmer than 15 degrees. Even, apparently, in the springtime when it is 20 degrees outside. As a result of my space greed, I have suffered blistery burns on my right boob and left bicep from clutching a hot water bottle too tight, and maxed out my massage benefits, regularly going in for professional assistance in unclenching from the cold. These are champagne complaints if ever I made ‘em. Characteristically, I am going to solve my problems by moving. I’ll let you know when and where.

Meanwhile I was watching prime time drama with my mother and the actors were complaining about having to have sex too many times during the 48 hour ovulation window in an effort to get pregnant. Oh boo hoo indeed. The retched “work” of “making” a baby.

But is infertility a champagne complaint? It’s worth asking, especially while the economy is tanking and millions are starving in a global food crisis and it’s STILL a political and financial struggle to prevent and terminate pregnancy…is it a human right to procreate? I’m going to keep campaigning for NB to step up to the plate and cover the cost of women choosing NOT to have children, but what about the reproductively unendowed who choose to parent?

We never hear of it, but do women/couples who do NOT have tens of thousands of surplus liquidity to spend on fertility treatments also champagne complain for pregnancy? As much as I abhor the technology-driven re-commercialization of medicine, my jerk-reaction thinking is primitively like the SPCA: pay the fee to prove to me you really want this. But then of course what proof of commitment is a deep pocket?

There is a thread of thinking that spins motherhood as such a compulsory experience for women in this (alienating) backlash era that fertility treatment should be covered because it would be as damaging to go through life without a wanted baby as to be forced to bring to term an unwanted pregnancy. Being socially bullied into maternity does not exactly sound like a medical necessity.

Yet a baby, unlike every other “accessory” of the modern age, does not come “in degrees”. It’s not like buying the knock off or taking public transit or renting or eating cheap food from cans. There are no substitute goods, no heterogeneity in the market. Fertility is not a Baby Duck complaint either, as it were.

So what I’d like to see somewhere, even in a novel?, is the fertility complaint explored outside of the Rosedale estates, outside of the ivory tower and kitten heels on King and Bay, outside of where the market alone negotiates the meaning and meaningfulness of childbearing. There is more to this than poor little rich girl crying into her Veuve...