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Sorry, Annie.

I ain't buyin' it.

I think you are a genius with a camera in hand-and I'm sure that as I write this I am forfeiting what little chance I ever had of getting my picture taken by you-but you didn't forget to have a family. You just decided-like a lot of women-that you wanted to do what you wanted to do. A lot. For a really long time.

Then-once you did all the fun stuff-you wanted a kid.

And once you wanted that kid-Mother Nature and the natural course of sexual events and the kid's own best interests should be tossed aside in favor of your "Things To Do At 51" birthday party Post-it note.

Having a kid at forty is considered a dangerous proposition by every available medical expert. After forty it becomes a roll of the baby dice. But fifty? That not only desperately increases the health risk to mother AND child, but also the chances they will both be wearing diapers at exactly the same time.

The reasons nature wants a woman to have her children between the ages of twenty and thirty-five are absolute and incredibly logical:

So the mom remains clear of mind and strong of body.

So your breast milk is full of the nutrients the baby needs to build its necessary immune system.

So when the kid graduates from high school you can be in the audience with a digital camera and a tear in your eye instead of sucking on an oxygen mask from your high-end Stephen Hawking-designed wheelchair.

You have kids when you are young because their lives become your life. That's what a mom is meant to do. You don't have kids because your life is almost over and there's nothing to watch on TV and you've shot all the imaginable cover ideas with every single celebrity still alive.

To make matters worse-four years later? Annie Leibovitz decided to have MORE kids. Twins. When she was fifty-five years old. Only this time with the help of some fertility drugs.

And a surrogate mother.

I guess Annie forgot she had a vagina.

CHAPTER 9 - Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Welcome-In Utero

This business of surrogate parenthood reached its peak for me when I turned on The Today Show one morning to see Lisa and Brian Switzer. They had tried for eight years to get pregnant-many, many times. No luck.

When that didn't work-they tried fertility drugs. Many many times. Ninety thousand dollars' worth. Still no luck.

They reached the point where the final doctor they saw said to Lisa-no doubt in the nicest way possible-"your uterus is just not up to the task."

Ouch.

So they then approached Brian's sister and she agreed to carry their baby to term-until she was hit by a drunk driver and suffered back injuries that didn't paralyze her but left her unable to physically deal with a pregnancy.

Once again-if there was no bad luck, they wouldn't have any luck at all, right?

Wrong. Here is where I would pose this question-what does God have to do? Write you a personal note? Hit your tits with lightning? Set your dick on fire?

Maybe He just doesn't want you to have a child.

Do the Switzers get that message? No. Do they reconsider what God's plan for them might be? Adoption? Working with special-needs kids? Helping Augusten Burroughs's weird blabbermouth brother?

No no no no.

They deem it must be time to Rent-A-Vadge.

But not even an American vadge.

Apparently a uterus in the United States of America-just like everything else here-costs more to rent. So the Switzers have outsourced a uterus in India.

I believe this is the point at which buying a Chinese baby starts to serve its purpose. There may be as many as a billion kids over there waiting to be delivered to the wide streets of America and renamed from Wang Chung to Colleen or Ida or Louisiana Switzer-as difficult as it may be to grow up different even in the confines of your own house, it's gotta be better than your parents basically purchasing a pussy from overseas just because it's cheaper.

I mean-you may not look like your adoptive parents but at least you're already here on earth.

But then again-this is America. Where we get whatever we want whenever we want it. And if