On one side of the world, 46-year-old Radha Patel gives birth to her grandchildren - twins from the eggs of her own daughter and the sperm of her son-in-law - while on the other side, 57-year-old television writer Lynda La Plante celebrates her adoption of a six-month-old baby boy.
Two very different stories, but with a common thread - the powerful urge to have children whatever the obstacles of biology - and with a common, familiar conclusion of utter joy in the babies' arrival. As both Aakash Nagla, father of the Indian twins, and Lynda La Plante made clear, the desire to have a baby overrode every other consideration. For the former, it took precedence over his Hindu family's religious scruples and fear of social disapproval; for the latter, a baby was more important than all her considerable fortune and worldly success.
That urge to parent children is so deeply rooted in so many of us that it will continue to pressure human ingenuity to devise whatever technological, legal and social invention and adaptation is needed to ensure it is satisfied. Patel, for example, was initially "horrified" at the idea, but her objections were overcome by her family and she insisted that her daughter's delight in having two children meant that she now had "no regrets".
The technological ingenuity seems to know no bounds. Yesterday, news stories reported a mother giving birth to babies conceived 12 years ago and who have spent the first embryonic years of their life in a freezer. Such a practice could become relatively common as women routinely freeze embryos as an insurance measure against rising infertility rates. Just as surrogacy delinks the genetic and the gestational mother, so embryo-freezing disconnects conception and gestation. The pattern of procreation and how it has been ordered in human societies is being unpicked, bit by bit, and nothing is left stable; it no longer even seems absurd to imagine that, in my lifetime, fathers will be able to carry a pregnancy.
Faced with that powerful drive to parent, all ethical and religious objections are knocked down, sooner or later, like pins in a bowling alley. The only boundaries the British government has been able to police - to some extent - are the marketisation of the process (surrogate wombs, eggs, sperm for sale?) and consumerisation (can we choose sex or eye colour?). But the government's policing is rapidly being outpaced by the globalisation of the procreation industry. Click on to Google and, within seconds, you have the vital statistics of surrogate mothers offering their services for $20,000 plus expenses. If you can't choose your blue-eyed baby boy in the UK, simply go elsewhere in the world (if you're rich enough).
That was what one gay British couple did in the television series Making Babies the Gay Way, which finished on Channel 4 last week. Their third child was a twin of one sibling but born four years later, and was half-sibling of the other. It takes a while to work it out, so try it another way: they all had the same genetic mother, different surrogates, and two shared a father. There was one extraordinary bit of footage as one of their fathers talked to the toddlers about their "mother" in America.
The series also explored another permutation, a lesbian couple having a baby, and interviewed the delightfully chatty two sons from one mother's previous heterosexual relationship. "They're like sisters, like we're brothers," said one son (he was about six) of the two mothers now in his life. "No, no they're not," said his slightly older brother very authoritatively, but he petered out, he couldn't think of a more appropriate analogy. The boys wondered whether they would be uncles to their new sister (with whom they shared no genetic material): "It's confusing," commented one boy.
It is how this generation understand their origins that is intriguing. I remember my first nephew trying to understand kinship when he must have been about three. It was very important to this toddler to work out what relationship I had to his grandmother, his mother and his other aunts and uncles. These ideas are so enormous and so basic to most people's understanding of their sense of place and identity that it is almost impossible to imagine ourselves into the place of this growing number of children whose arrival in the world has been less orthodox.
Children whose family structure lies outside the norm will bear a heavy burden: they not only have to work out their own narrative, but then explain it to others. What is fragmenting is a common, collective experience of how families are made and where they sit in the life course, and how that structures the idea of generations. When an elderly, grey-haired lady pushes a pram, is she the mother or the grandmother, or a bit of both? As families become more diverse, we will not be able to operate on shared assumptions of common experience - with all the potential for solidarity and identification that that triggers. As with anything unfamiliar, common responses are frequently hostile or polite disengagement: the preface to the Channel 4 series was vox pops in the street expressing instinctive distaste for gay families.
Only a culture so fixated on technology and the satisfaction of individual desire could have set aside the intangible, unknowable needs of a future generation: like the importance of a sense of belonging and relationship for a secure identity; or the contribution to social cohesion of everyone subscribing to some common rules on the process of procreation (even if they didn't always live by them). The resourcefulness and resilience of human nature is such that I would argue it could make good that gap - given time. But ours is a culture that doesn't give time. No sooner are we adjusting our understanding of "mother" to cover three distinct categories - genetic, gestational and carer - than there is another challenge to these building blocks of human interaction.
This fertility revolution threatens to outstrip our capacity to understand our sense of self and what makes us who we are, and the all-too-likely risk is of confused, disoriented individuals. It will require immense parental emotional ingenuity and skill to raise secure children when their passage to life has been via Petri dishes, freezers, grandmothers and commercial surrogates. It's not impossible, just very demanding. We seem to have stumbled into this experiment on the next generation driven by that human compulsion to compensate for our mortality by giving life.
