Baby-making these days is swaddled in complexity
How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women and the World
(sz) You might have forgotten this snippet of local news. In 2005, a San Francisco woman gave birth to a baby who as an embryo had been frozen for 13 years. While this may have been perceived as a curiosity, now it can be grasped as a component in a much larger story, one about to swamp us all with sticky choices.
This bigger story is laid out in exquisite and disquieting detail by award-winning science writer Liza Mundy in “Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women and the World.” The book is the result of an assignment given to Mundy to write about infertility among the poor. What she discovered was that many of her colleagues were also experiencing this heartrending problem. It also became evident to Mundy that the world has undergone a major shift. The almost quaint environment in which she formed her attitudes concerning reproductive choice during the 1980s had been superseded by a more Byzantine landscape.
A feature writer for the Washington Post Magazine, Mundy has done her research well. She conducted hundreds of interviews with “mothers, fathers, prospective parents, infertility doctors, lab technicians, social workers, surrogate mothers, egg donors, sperm donors and children (many now adults) conceived through surrogacy and in vitro fertilization,” using them to penetrate the high-tech, high-dollar world of making babies. more…
From: »S.F.Gate.com« (book review)