The Homestead is accessible only by a narrow, winding dirt road. A young woman greets us at the beginning of the property, silently opening the imposing metal gate to admit our vehicle. Her dress does a poor job hiding the telltale signs of a woman in the family way. Her ring finger is conspicuously naked.
The thick foliage breaks to reveal the rolling hills and verdant farmlands that border the commune. The compound includes a sizable farmhouse, a cherry-red barn, a disorganized vegetable garden where cucumbers sprout between the tomatoes, interspersed with weeds and wildflowers. The house borders on dereliction. Windows are hung with quilts to offer some respite from the creeping chill of autumn. Young women sleep three or four to a bed. It seems like no place for a child, but babies are the most prominent feature of this place.
A three-year-old child is the eldest, bright-eyed and sturdy. She takes after her mother, Margaret Morrow. Once you know that little girl is supposedly the product of only her mother’s DNA, you find yourself looking too closely at her, hoping to detect some giveaway sign of a father’s influence. A different nose shape, perhaps, or pale eyes in contrast to dark. But looking at Margaret and Josephine （Josie for short） is like staring at a time lapse—the same face looking at you as a toddler, as a mother.
Josie is first in line, proudly bearing the name of her creator, Joseph Bellanger. There are others. One-year-old Isabelle sleeps in a makeshift crib, a dresser drawer padded with blankets. Catherine wears a cloth diaper as her mother cradles her. One young woman is expecting her child to arrive any day, and still another informs us that she is newly pregnant. Nine young women form the core group of devoted volunteers, and Bellanger confidently claims that all the women will have given birth before long.
Dr. Joseph Bellanger is a charismatic figure. As he speaks about the women, one is reminded of an artist posing in front of his canvases. While the women keep their hair long and unbrushed, Bellanger retains a gentleman’s composure in his bow tie and tidy white lab coat. His home is back in Maryland with his wife and two young sons, but he conducts his most essential work from an ersatz lab here on the compound.
According to the doctor, these miraculous infants are the result of work that began with his scientific experimentation on lab rabbits in the late 1960s, experimentation which produced parthenogenetic offspring, although the results were never replicated. Bellanger’s time attending medical school at Maryland State University was marked by controversy. “I was too single-minded and ambitious even for fellow scientists,” Bellanger notes with a merry laugh. “But I’ve learned not to foster grudges. That’s all in the past now, and these Girls are my future.”
By now, the nine women—unwed and romantically unattached volunteers—have become a vibrant group known as the Homestead. This wryly irreverent name was selected by Bellanger himself for its suggestion of traditional family ties—the very ties that Bellanger hopes to sever.
While some animal species can produce asexually, this is the first time in documented modern history that human beings have conceived without the presence of sperm. If Dr. Bellanger’s claims hold any weight, he could be restructuring the very nature of mankind.
After departing medical school, Bellanger made the unorthodox decision to bypass further time in a laboratory setting and move immediately to working with human subjects. Bellanger explains: “You don’t change history without taking a few risks.”
5
The building at 524 Twelfth Street was sizable, three stories of Victorian grandeur, and for a second I was awed. Then I pulled the Chevy along the curb and all the problems came springing into view. Hanging drainpipe, missing shingles, Mickey Mouse bedsheets serving as ersatz curtains. Most unexpectedly: the concrete sign rising from the shrubbery. TWELFTH STREET HALFWAY HOUSE. EST. 1980.
I’d been driving since before dawn, too anxious to sit still and waste time, and as I stepped out of the car, I was alive with the shaky energy of sleeplessness. My mother could be here. Right inside. I remembered a time I’d stayed the night at a sort-of-friend’s house, the kind of giddy slumber party my mother had always disapproved of. I’d woken in the night missing her so badly it was like a stomach cramp. Walking home alone at two in the morning, my neighborhood turned alien in the moonlight, I was shivering with nerves, trying to stay brave. A few blocks from my house there was an apparition down the street. Bathrobe-clad, Maglite in hand. My mother. Coming to find me.
How did you know? I’d asked, hand in hers, comfort falling over me like a blanket.