Spill

On a sunny day in the Gulf, you can see the curve of the horizon over open water. Look long enough and you can almost feel it spinning: a cosmic egg turning and turning toward birth.

When we were trying to have a baby, I read a lot about optimizing the health of my eggs. I started a Mediterranean diet. I gave up drinking alcohol, buying plastic water bottles, and wearing my phone in my back pocket. I learned the word “phthalates.” Nothing helped.

The human cell is built just like the earth: a sphere made primarily of water with self-regulating systems that work together for the survival of the whole.

A healthy body makes healthy cells. A healthy world makes healthy bodies. What makes a healthy world?

I grew up in the right rattail of Alabama, an area affectionately known as the Redneck Riviera. We have some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, if you can ignore the oil rigs.

During the BP Oil Spill (later rebranded the “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill,” presumably to defer responsibility to the horizon), I watched three dead dolphins wash up on Perdido Beach. It was the largest marine oil spill in the history of petroleum. I refused to drive or ride in a car for months. We shut off the electricity and lit candles at night, our shadows looming around the house like clumsy giants. 

The ancient Greeks thought that life began spontaneously. The first people, according to this theory, were baked to life by some alchemy of earth and steam. And while they knew that humans reproduced in the obvious way, the ancients maintained that life started spontaneously all the time: tadpoles sprang up on pond rims, maggots were born from rotting flesh.

The trick was water. For philosophers like Thales and Anaximander, all you needed to spark life was the basic element of life itself. From water you come; to water you will return.

A lot of my friends worked the spill. Trussed up in their waders and kitchen gloves, spraying chemical Corexit on oil slicks and scooping it into bait buckets. All on BP’s dime: locals with boats turned hometown heroes through the “Vessels of Opportunity” program.

My partner started having migraines. A boy I used to go fishing with developed seizures. BP paid us more money than we’d ever seen, and we all signed releases.

The father of the philosophy of science, Karl Popper, and his wife Josephine chose not to have children. After the devastations of WWI, they felt the proper conditions for existence were no longer available. Popper said that this “was perhaps a cowardly but in a way a right decision.”^[1]

I sat with Popper’s fear for 10 years before I decided that it was another name for grief. Another five years before I decided that grief was another name for love. And finally, mercifully, that nothing changes until you call it by its true name.

At 37 years old, I made an appointment at the IVF clinic.

Spread-eagled on the examination table, I listened to the underwater sounds of my belly on the monitor while the kindly old man with the ultrasound wand divined my eggs’ fitness for the world. On the screen, an embarrassment of riches: a heap of perfect ellipses waiting in the dark. When he was done, he patted my thigh like a farmer done with his milking. I didn’t even mind.

Around the same time that Karl and Josephine were turning the nursery into a study (presciently, it turns out, as the next world war was already underway), scholars repackaged the Greek theory of “spontaneous generation” and made it more respectably scientific. They studied the basic substances thought to be present on early Earth—carbon, hydrogen, water vapor, and ammonia—and argued that, under the right conditions, these gases could react to form amino acids, the building blocks of life.^[2]

(Somewhere in a thermal vent, deep in the Pacific, the first eye opens.)

What are the necessary conditions for life? One in four people world-wide do not have reliable access to clean water.^[3] Over 99% of the world’s population breathes polluted air.^[4] The last eight years were the hottest on record,^[5] climate-related disasters have doubled in the past two decades,^[6] and one million species are at risk of extinction.^[7] I read these facts to arm myself. As if awareness were preparation. As if we could be prepared.

Science is the least effective coping mechanism.

Law, on the other hand, knows exactly what to do with fear.

In his landmark ruling that extrauterine embryos are children from the moment of conception, therefore their destruction is murder, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker announced that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”^[8] 

According to the state of Alabama, then, I have 18 children. One of whom is warm.

Here’s how it works: if you’re lucky, you start out with a whole cluster of grapes ripe for the picking. Then, in a Petri dish, they are fertilized with sperm. Some will form zygotes, which continue to grow in vitro until they become blastocysts—the many-celled donut-hole that, once implanted in a uterus, could begin multiplying and differentiating and growing its own fingernails. Most are put on ice for the future; only one or two at a time get a shot at the womb.

If my daughter ever asks, I will tell her: magic.

Most IVF moms have more embryos than they’ll ever have the ability or desire to use. Many of these embryos have genetic problems that would either result in miscarriage or painful, difficult lives for all involved. Destroying embryos is an unavoidable part of the process.

Now that it’s my turn, discarding is more difficult than I imagined. Not because I think I’m killing my children, but because I’m killing the idea of them, all the possible futures in which they might exist. All the hope they represent.

Conception is just another word for “idea.”

Which is to say, I mourn all the lives I cannot live.

Which is to say, letting go is the most radical act of love.

After the oil spill, the biggest problems were in the marshes. You could skim oil off the bay, and you could rake it off the beach, but when the oil settled into the reeds, it settled for the duration. Whole coastlines of estuary, ink-black and gasping for breath. Death rocking the ocean’s cradle. I can still see my father at Fort McRee with his minnow net, pulling in tar-blind turtles. Weeping over their bodies in the dunes.

Let us feel the wrath of a holy God.

The whole “spontaneous generation” shebang was finally put to bed by Louis Pasteur, who proved that life could not grow in sterilized water unless exposed to air.^[9] All previous experiments had failed to take airborne bacteria into account. Life floated into the Petri dish on the wings of an invisible stork.

Nothing exists in isolation. Not even in Petri dishes.

When does life begin? It doesn’t. It spills out of itself in all directions, like the ocean. Like love. Enter at any point into the whole.

Just after my daughter’s first birthday, I took her back home to the Alabama coast. Beaches so white and fine the sand barked underfoot. No trace of the spill save for all the traces we could not see, and everywhere, the insidious musk of diesel.

We sat in the sand at Pirate’s Cove and dug sandcastles too close to the surf. Every time a boat motored past, the waves would turn our towers back to sand as neatly as if we’d never built them. She squealed with joy at the rush of water, sand burying her feet like it was planting her there. Every time a castle fell, she grabbed her bucket and started shoveling.

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^[1] Zerin, Edward. “Karl Popper on God: The Lost Interview.” Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 2, 1998, p. 48.

^[2] Oparin, Aleksandr I. The Origin of Life. Translated by Sergius Morgulis, Macmillan, 1938. (Originally published 1924.)

^[3] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Water. United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/water. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.

^[4] World Health Organization, “Billions of People Still Breathe Unhealthy Air: New WHO Data,” WHO, 4 Apr. 2022, https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2022-billions-of-people-still-breathe-unhealthy-air-new-who-data. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.

^[5] World Meteorological Organization, “Past Eight Years Confirmed to Be the Eight Warmest on Record,” WMO, https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/past-eight-years-confirmed-be-eight-warmest-record. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.

^[6] United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, “The Human Cost of Disasters 2000–2019,” UNDRR, Oct. 2020, https://www.undrr.org/news/un-report-dramatic-rise-climate-disaster-over-last-twenty-years. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.

^[7] Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, United Nations, 2019.

^[8] Parker, Tom. LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C. Supreme Court of Alabama, 2024. Quoted in “Alabama Supreme Court Rules Frozen Embryos Are ‘Children.’” The Guardian, 20 Feb. 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/20/alabama-supreme-court-frozen-embryos-ruling. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.

^[9] Louis Pasteur. Experiments on the Generation of Microbes. 1861. Reprinted in John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin. Johns Hopkins UP, 1977.