Women Go To Great Lengths to Have Babies.

Baby Lust

I sometimes wonder whether, if I lived in a culture that fetishized motherhood less — one that didn’t expect celebrity moms to coo that motherhood is the “best thing I’ve ever done,” that didn’t use babies to sell everything from toilet paper to automobiles — I would have felt as compelled to go to such extremes to attain it (which I eventually did, no thanks to the fertility docs). It’s impossible to say, though Marsh and Ronner found that even in the 1960s and ’70s, involuntarily childless women submitted to operations, high doses of infertility drugs and risky experiments with I.V.F. in order to conceive. Apparently even then there was a world of difference between declaring you might not want a baby and being told you couldn’t have one.

I spent £20,000 on a new face to find a husband

And Shahnaz came to the rather drastic, and sad, conclusion that unless she radically changed her looks, the type of relationship she yearned for would elude her.

"I didn’t just want to marry anyone," she says.

"There were men that fancied me but I didn’t like them. I went on a few dates, but there was never anyone serious.

"My looks didn’t attract the sort of wealthy, intelligent men like Michael. Instead, they were seedy or unintelligent men who thought, mistakenly, that I would be the right woman for them."
. . .
Even though they have yet to go on a date, let alone start a physical relationship, Shahnaz is now pinning all her dreams on Michael, even going as far as to hope he will want to give her the children she so desperately longs for.

She refuses even to consider the notion that she may end up without the imagined family that spurred her along the path of cosmetic surgery in the first place.

"I always knew I’d be an older mother," she says confidently, denying that as a woman now in her 40s she may have left motherhood too late.

"I don’t feel my fertility is on the wane. In fact, I feel much younger than my real age.

"Everything is still in working order and I’m sure I won’t have any problems conceiving."

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