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Sexed.

Article Excerpt
Growing up Catholic, I was always afraid of something: unconfessed sins; demonic possession; Sister Alice, my grade school principal, who once clamped her talons on my shoulder and marched me to her office for having a boy's name magic-markered across my palm while receiving Holy Communion. But the one thing that gave me recurring nightmares was the idea that just praying to have a baby could get me knocked up.

One Sunday, maybe riffing on the Old Testament plight of Abraham and Sarah, our pastor's sermon involved the story of two parishioners, a husband and wife, who had been trying for years to have a child. This was the 1970s, pre-Louise Brown, and apparently the only infertility treatment readily available to the couple was prayer. They prayed together; our pastor prayed with them; and, lo and behold, these prayers were answered. Our pastor had baptized the couple's one-month-old daughter a week earlier.

The adults in the congregation applauded this happy ending, while my seven-year-old mind began spinning faster than Linda Blair's head in The Exorcist. Of course I wasn't planning on praying for a baby, but what if I did so accidentally? What if I asked God for a hamster or black Converse high-tops but somehow worded my request unclearly and wound up pregnant instead?

According to psychologist Anne Bernstein's book Flight of the Stork, in which the author analyzes a series of interviews she conducted with children in the 1970s to see what they knew about human reproduction, there were lots of other confused kids out there besides me. There was the young boy Bernstein interviewed who, presumably having been told the sperm-and-egg story by his parents, figured that, since he came from an egg, he must be a chicken. There was the preschool-age girl who stopped eating because she believed she had "a baby in her tummy," just like her pregnant mother did, and she feared that "were she to eat, all that yukky food would bury her wonderful baby." Not every child with creative ideas about their origins develops such fears, but Bernstein's research led her...

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