Starting with the concept of international adoption, stretching it like silly putty, then taking it out for a very long walk, you could come to this story out of India that describes a scenario that's becoming increasingly common.

It's about a 45-year-old acupuncture physician in Miami, Nicole Brown, hoping to hear she's in the process of gestating a baby created with the egg of a 27-year-old woman in Vietnam ... after checking for eggs in Argentina first ... that was implanted into her uterus in India.

No, it's not that her uterus was in India, but that she went to India WITH her uterus for the implantation. How the egg got there isn't mentioned. Neither is where the sperm came from, but I'll assume Dr. Brown's husband might have brought his own along on the trip to Mumbai, but maybe not.

So ... confused? I am.

That's to be expected, I suppose, when the story is about what are now being called "reproductive travelers".

Although the term conjures in my mind an image of globetrotting Matryoshka dolls dropping miniature images of themselves everywhere they stop ... I don't know why -- it's just how my mind works ... it's actually about economy IVF that puts more control into the hands infertile couples than they feel they would have at home.

"There's been a tremendous jump in the last two years," in patients from western countries, said Anjali Malpani [The Brown's doctor in India].

In the past 12 months, more than a third of her 166 patients were foreigners, including 33 from the United States and Europe, drawn by a five-fold price difference and the lack of waiting time.

The Browns are already an international family ... Nicole was born in Vietnam and raised in France and her husband is American ... so there's an existing foundation that sits across borders, and their take is that their child will fit right in, coming to them from the get-go well-traveled.

All well and good, but having been around the adoption world for a while now and having heard just about every permutation possible of the "I wanna know my roots" chorus in C minor, I can't help but wonder what Internet groups of the future will be singing in a few years.

How early does the conversation start that explains the reproductive realities of imported donor eggs, petri dishes and international gynecology?

The Browns are insisting the they will, "bring our child here and tell our child that this is where it all began for us" ... 'here' being India, but that seems to me to be missing the point.

Would a couple who conceived the old fashioned way feel compelled to share the when, where, why and how of the circumstance of conception with their child?

"Honey Lamb, this is the exact place where Mommy and Daddy ... " ... well, you get the idea.

Will couples like the Browns be retracing their steps in some future Indian vacation to show the little Brown where their first cells spilt?

And how is this important, anyway?

Now the egg, however ... ah, that's the issue.

Where and how are Big People questions of vague interest. Who, however, might be a Little Person question. And if it isn't, when does it become an answer?

With adults who came about through sperm donations now demanding access to information about their biological fathers, adoptees fighting for open records and a backlash to the age of secrecy that is rocking the world, what can we expect from kids born to Miami doctors from Vietnamese donor eggs via India?

And what can they expect?

Remember the days when explaining adoption seemed complicated?



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