It took me a while to figure out what it was about Melanie Thernstrom’s cover story in this week’s New York Times Magazine that seemed so off-putting.

“Their Bodies, My Babies” is Thernstrom’s account of her battle against infertility and her decision to hire two surrogates and an egg donor to produce Violet and Keiran - technically gestational twins, but born five days apart from different wombs and thus dubbed the ‘twiblings.’ Clearly meant to be a triumph-of-the-spirit stories about strangers coming together to give an infertile couple the family of their dreams, it felt curiously flat to me....and in a very familiar way.

Then it dawned on me: I’d read this same story before. Two years ago. In a cover story in the New York Times Magazine.

Okay, not exactly the same story. But Alexandra Kuczynski’s November 2008 account of her battle against infertility and her decision to hire a surrogate to birth little Max matches Thernstrom’s in almost every respect, from obligatory references to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ to the passive-aggressive descriptions of their surrogates, to their aggressively incandescent anger at a society that just doesn’t understand their righteous desire to make babies at any cost. The Times just doubled down on the number of people involved in the process and the number of babies produced. They didn’t even substantially change the title: Kuczynski’s story was “Her Body, My Baby.”

So, just as I did in the waning days of 2008, I ask...why? Why, oh Great and Good Times Magazine Editor, do you feel the need to periodically unleash these 8,000-word tales of woe upon us? Are we forgetting to offer up unto you some sort of blood sacrifice? If we send you a goat, will you stop? How about a nice bottle of wine?

Jokes aside, the “their bodies, our babies” meme ends up doing a real disservice to the writers. Alex Kuczynski and Melanie Thernstrom are both professional authors, and as examples of long-form personal essay, both stories are mechanically superb. But they stumble into an emotional  trap. They think they’re talking about how modern science and the ancient human desire to help those in need combined to make precious new life. What they’re really dissecting is their own pain and anger over the cosmic injustice of infertility and society’s seeming refusal to validate their course of action.

With no impartial voice to rein them in, they ultimately come off as two of the most utterly self-absorbed human beings in Times history. Which is no mean feat, by the by.

An impartial voice might have dislodged these moms-to-be from the center of the universe. Impartial might have tried to get into the heads of the dads-to-be, the surrogates, the husbands of the surrogates. Impartial might have looked less defensively at the class implications of wealthy women paying middle-class women to be incubators. Impartial might have been able to get beyond the anger and look at how our society still defines women as “mothers” and others, and further divides mothers as “real,” or “good,” or “bad.”  

An impartial voice might have looked with fresh eyes at the mental gymnastics it to be, in the words of one child in Thernstrom’s story, “the lady with the broken belly.” She clings to an idealized view of what’s happening. She’s paradoxically angry both at donor and surrogate brokers that dismiss her romanticized picture of surrogacy to medical professionals who can’t bring themselves to un-romantically refer to the women under their care as “gestational carriers,” no matter how much Thernstrom complains.

She insists that there are so many people involved she can’t possibly be jealous at anyone, but she’s very clearly -- and understandably -- jealous at a surrogate who looks like a rugged pioneer women “who could till a field and give birth squatting without the assistance of anesthesia” and another whose post-partum breast is “as swollen, quivering and alive-looking as a sea animal.”    

Impartial, at the very least, would have spared us an ending fable about a “Fairy God-Donor” who gave her “magical eggs” to be given to “angel women” to “help them grow.”

An impartial voice also might have done some follow-up. Within weeks of her 2008 cover story, Alex Kuczynski learned she was pregnant. She carried to term and delivered a healthy baby just about a year after the arrival of her surrogate-born son. A wonderful and  joyous thing, certainly, but one that opens up a whole new set of questions.   

Finally, an impartial voice might have added perspective. While it’s been practiced for over 30 years, only about 26,000 American children have been born via surrogacy. Today, out of four million births each year, fertility experts reckon that fewer than 1,500 are born to surrogates. It’s legally complicated and prohibitively expensive.

Still, this is the brave new world, and reading through Thernstrom’s article online the other day, I couldn’t help but note a contextual ad Google helpfully flashed up on the screen: “Indian Surrogates, 70% off U.S. Prices!” That, oh Great and Good Editor, seems to be a story that needs 8,000 words.