Cry(obank) baby!

Having said that, your cheeky columnist fails to understand why a child-friendly person of any sex, civil status or sexual preference cannot have a child either through adoption, surrogate mothers, sperm banks or any other ingenious methods offered by law and science Ğ provided that the parent(s) can emotionally and financially care for the offspring.

Take, for example, Güler Özkul, who decided that she would have a child through a sperm bank, or cryobank as it is called in more medical circles. Educated, intelligent and stable, she has decided, at 43, to go to a cryobank in the United States and have a child.

Even the careless readers of the magazines, not to mention the front pages, know now why she opted to do so: Her partner was not interested in fathering (still another) child, but the determined mother-to-be wanted one. So she is now pregnant, and besides the usual back pains and enlarged feet, she is also experiencing fame pains and an enlarged debate around her right to have a cryobank baby.

Güler Özkul, the daughter of a famous actor and an excellent actress in her own right, is far from being the only famous Turkish woman who decided that a bank was more reliable than a man...

A few years ago, a Turkish actress, Leyla Kömürcü, had decided to use the sperm of some nice guy that she did not know rather than some not-so-nice guy that she did. Ah, but the debate that ensued then and now dragged everyone in: the moralists, the liberals and, of course, the pious.

"The sperm bank debate divides up the theologians," said a Hürriyet headline, omitting that every single issue seems to be dividing the Turks nowadays. The General Directorate of Religious Affairs, whose snappy answers on its Web site’s question-and-answer section replies to everything from yoga to Saint Valentine’s Day, declared that a cry-o-bank baby was not approved by Islam.

"It resembles adultery," said its Fatwa line. (Your columnist is somewhat unclear about this phone line and wonders whether it is something like "dial F for a Fast Fatwa!")

The most unexpected support came from Professor Beyza Bilgin, a soft-spoken academic known as the first female "preacher" of Turkey. She objected to other colleagues who equated artificial insemination from a sperm bank with adultery.

"It is the will of God, who wants the human race to continue, that such a method is open to the people. We should naturally use this method with responsibility, but to me, it should be considered like a kidney implant rather than a case of adultery," she said.

Leyla Kömürcü, who passed a court decree on the protection of privacy of her child, said: "I think I am a lot more honest than women who simply go and steal a baby from a man through a one-night affair. Through the data in the cryobank in New York, I know that my son’s father is a 25-year-old scientist. I will give my child all those details. I think it is very straightforward."

One academic of theology said that it was not fair on the child: "When the child asks, would you simply show the building and tell the child came from a freezer there?" said one theologian.

Well, that certainly beats the lark and the cabbage story, or other forms of politically correct versions, such as "then daddy planted that little seed in mother’s belly."

One wonders whether a mother would have an easier time telling her child: "Your father is this mediatic playboy, who, while married to Turkey’s self-declared most beautiful woman, got me pregnant. During their very mediatic divorce, your daddy told all the press that he wanted me to have an abortion. Then, as soon as he learned that you were a boy, he changed his tune and now, we are married and that is that."

Let Feraye Tanyolaç-cum-Çilingiroğlu decide which is more straightforward after all.