Baby Seeds

When I was a small child, a friend of my mother's was having a baby, so my mother and I went to the store. She picked out the correct packet, envelope and card, to send to the expectant mother, making sure the packet was for a girl. Unable to read, and knowing that daddys putting seed in mommies, I believed my mother was buying baby seeds. The pictures on the cards clearly showed the contents of the envelopes: baby boys in blue, baby girls in pink, and babies of uncertain gender in yellow.
This didn't entirely make sense to me. Why would my mother be asked to casually purchase such an important item? Surely, the expectant mother and her husband would desire to choose the variety of their own child.

And wouldn't such seeds be sold in catalogues the same as seed for our garden? It also occurred to me that if baby seeds were purchased and marriage was for when two people loved each other, a woman should be able to marry another woman. The baby would have two mothers.

In a few years I developed a better understanding of the difference between plants and animals. But the idea of a catalogue for baby seeds still intrigues me. I now believe that the moral arguments against a woman marrying another woman might be more properly applied to the purchase of baby seeds because, with such a purchase, moral and ethical issues compound. For a science fiction writer like me, such issues are fodder for stories.