ABSTRACT
To want a child at all costs, as is the case in medically assisted reproduction, means that sometimes desire is lost. The child plays a part in the wish to make something immortal subsist beyond the mortal being. Sometimes wanting a child is a way of combating the feeling that time has gone by too fast, and of overcoming the impression of loss that goes with this feeling. Sometimes it is no longer clear if it is still the child that is wanted, or if it is only the satisfaction that is wanted at any cost. In some situations, though, the impression is the reverse, that each person is having a child on their own, each playing their own hand against the impossible. The wish to have a child at any cost can fill the place of the desire for a child. The desire to be pregnant does not automatically imply the desire to become a mother.
