Several of my friends have asked me if I had seen last week’s #1 movie, Baby Mama. I guess it shows how much my job has become part of my persona. Whenever my friends hear of anything related to fertility, they will ask me for my expert opinion, even when it comes to fictionalized misrepresentations of fertility treatment. The last time this was prevalent was during all those episodes of Friends with Chandler and Monica’s surrogate baby. I’m not sure why they do that to me. I don’t ever ask my marine biologist friend what she thought of Finding Nemo.

So today, as with many Thursdays, I try to take a half day, if I can. Fortunately, it was feasible today for me to meet a friend for a good lunch of Thai food. Afterwards, she suggested seeing an afternoon movie and while I would have preferred to see Iron Man on the big screen, she had already seen it and suggested we go see Baby Mama instead. I took it as a sign of fate that I was destined to see this, no matter how much I had tried to avoid it. I must admit, I went into it with a prejudice that this would be yet another Hollywood attempt to get some cheap laughs on the back of the popular topic of fertility. And what did I find? Hmm, since I don’t often get a chance to play movie reviewer, I will seize this opportunity and give my thoughts from a reproductive endocrinologist’s perspective.

The first few minutes started out promising. A recap of the life of the central character, played by the talented Tina Fey, described her career as a successful executive, including the decisions she made regarding postponing childbirth in favor of climbing the corporate ladder. I was almost convinced that this would be a quality treatment of this very relevant topic. However, it went downhill from there. Sure, I might be biased and nit-picky, but the portrayals of the clinical scenes played fast and loose with reality and medical accuracy. Tina’s RE was a goofball and very insensitively and demeaningly criticized her T-Shaped uterus. When she was choosing a sperm donor, it was the doctor who sat with her and personally reviewed the sperm donor profiles with her on a computer screen. Er.. we don’t really do that. Not only did the profiles all show pictures of the donors (and again, sperm donors don’t reveal their pictures), with a press of a button, he was able to morph the donors’ pictures with Tina’s picture to create a composite prediction of what the baby would look like. Neat idea, but far from reality.

When Tina’s embryos were transferred into the surrogate’s womb, instead of a small syringe, he used a gigantic 60cc syringe attached to a catheter that looked two feet long. Still, I did get a slight laugh out of it. I also smiled when they poked fun at the reality of how the stresses of infertility really bring out a lot of worry and pessimism. One of the books that Tina bought at the bookstore, after the pregnancy was confirmed, was a book whose cover read in huge letters "101 Things That Can Go Wrong with your Pregnancy".

Most of all, I tried to quell my disturbance at the fact that this was a surrogate who smoked, ate junk food, and was in an unstable relationship with an emotionally abusive boyfriend. The reality is that surrogates who work with reputable agencies are meticulously screened and someone like Amy Poehler’s character would NEVER have been chosen. I don’t want to spoil things for those who haven’t seen the movie, but the twists and turns are not as they initially seem. I can imagine that the movie might even be emotionally disturbing to those who suffer infertility as it callously presents an unlikely scenario which could be extremely heart-breaking.

On the bright side, it wasn’t TERRIBLE. There were enough sprinklings of comic moments that managed to keep my attention throughout the entire film (barely) including some funny scenes with the childbirth coach. A very special treat was the fantastic performance of comedic genius, Steve Martin, as a New Age health food mogul. It reminded me of my childhood and how much I loved his work back then. That, for me, was worth the price of the matinee tickets. I think the next time patients visit me with their babies, I will hold the baby to my forehead and transfer my aura and mojo to them the way Martin did in the movie, just for a good laugh.

In summary, those who are searching for an intelligent treatment of the topics of infertility and surrogacy had best look elsewhere. Those looking for some typical SNL humor from a talented cast might not be as disappointed, but still, I think they would be better off waiting for the DVD.