A wide-ranging history of assisted reproductive technologies and their
ethical implications.
Finalist of the PROSE Award for Best Book in History of Science,
Medicine and Technology by the Association of American Publishers
Since the 1978 birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in England,
more than eight million children have been born with the help of
assisted reproductive technologies. From the start, they have stirred
controversy and raised profound questions: Should there be limits to the
lengths to which people can go to make their idea of family a reality?
Who should pay for treatment? How can we ensure the ethical use of these
technologies? And what can be done to address the racial and economic
disparities in access to care that enable some to have children while
others go without?
In The Pursuit of Parenthood, historian Margaret Marsh and
gynecologist Wanda Ronner seek to answer these challenging questions.
Bringing their unique expertise in gender history and women's health to
the subject, Marsh and Ronner examine the unprecedented
means--liberating for some and deeply unsettling for others--by which
families can now be created. Beginning with the early efforts to create
embryos outside a woman's body and ending with such new developments as
mitochondrial replacement techniques and uterus transplants, the authors
assess the impact of contemporary reproductive technology in the United
States.
In this volume, we meet the scientists and physicians who have developed
these technologies and the women and men who have used them. Along the
way, the book dispels a number of fertility myths, offers policy
recommendations that are intended to bring clarity and judgment to this
complicated medical history, and reveals why the United States is still
known as the "Wild West" of reproductive medicine.
