About a year and a half ago, I used this space (”Annelidanger,” 4/21/2004) to raise awareness about an insidious problem on the Cornell campus - namely the way that worms slither onto the sidewalk in the rain and are, for lack of a better term, totally gross. Though an Ad Hoc Committee on Worm Welfare has yet to be assembled, I have been satisfied with the public response and, for 19 months, I have laid down my arms against a sea of squashed yucky things.

But now I must take them up again.

If you’ve been on the Arts Quad, you’ve probably noticed them. They blanket the sidewalk that runs north-south in front of Stone Row (Morrill, McGraw and White Halls) in numbers never seen before, quantities too staggering to believe. Thousands of caterpillars darken the cement, flattened by the treads of unsuspecting undergrads and gallivanting grad students. And at night — oh, the scene! — the sidewalk lives with the teeming, wriggling bodies of thousands more. It’s positively fulsome.
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Let’s begin today with a pop quiz. Take out your number two pencils, everybody.

1. A man and a woman conceive and give birth to a child the “old-fashioned” way. Who are the child’s parents?
2. A man and a woman adopt a 10-month-old infant. Who are the child’s parents?
3. A woman has in vitro fertilization with another woman’s egg and her male partner’s sperm. The egg is implanted in her uterus and she gives birth to the child. Who are the child’s parents?
4. A man and a woman employ a surrogate mother to be implanted with a donor ovum that has been fertilized with donor sperm. The surrogate mother gives birth to the child, and the original man and woman take custody of it. Who are the child’s parents?

The answer to the first question is likely obvious, but the other questions seem to beg for a more nuanced use of terms: the distinction between genetic parents and what I’ll call familial parents (those who actually raise the child) is useful for answering the second and third questions. The fourth question adds a third term to the mix, one that we don’t usually use but that perhaps we should: a biological parent — currently, it can only be a biological mother — is one who carries the child prenatally and gives birth to it. (This relationship is not insignificant, as the number of surrogate mothers reluctant to give up the children they birth can attest.)
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