Expecting Miracles: On the Path of Hope from Infertility to Parenthood - Hardcover

Zouves, Christo; Sullivan, Julie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805060464 ISBN 13: 9780805060461

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1999

Synopsis

The medical director of the Pacific Coast Fertility Center reveals the combination of compassion and technology that can make the difference in conceiving a child

About this title

About the Author

Christo Zouves, M.D., is the medical director at Pacific Coast Fertility Center in San Francisco and a member of the Medical Advisory Board of RESOLVE, a national resource organization for those battling infertility. He lives outside of San Francisco. Julie Sullivan is a reporter for The Spokesman Review in Spokane, WA.

Reviews

Motivated by the desire to have a child, many couples have overcome infertility problems with medical intervention. Zouves, who is the medical director at the Pacific Coast Fertility Center, now recounts, with the assistance of Sullivan, a reporter for the Spokane, Ore., Spokesman-Review, many stories of the women and men he has treated by performing in vitro fertilization, by ISCI (the direct injection of a single sperm into an egg), by implanting frozen embryos and by recommending the use of egg donors and surrogates who are paid to bear a child for the infertile couples. However, with the exception of Carol and her husband SteveAwho decided to adopt after becoming psychologically exhausted by Carol's painful and expensive fertility treatmentsAall of Zouves's anecdotes end with ecstatic parents who bring home a brand new baby. Given that these technological procedures have a high failure rate, it is difficult not to view this account as a rosy advertisement for the services of the author's clinic. Several of the cases suggest that the doctor rarely turns down anyone who expresses a desire to have a child and can back it up with the financial wherewithal to gamble on new medical technologies. Zouves includes descriptions of how he helped a couple in their 50s to have a child and how he treated a menopausal woman who had a history of breast cancer with dangerous hormones in the hope that she would become pregnant. Even more disquieting is his spirited defense of the fertility clinic's money-back guarantee program, which the AMA has condemned as exploitive and misleading. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This testament to the pain of infertility and the promise of reproductive technology relentlessly accentuates the positive even as it describes the utter desperation of couples who are willing to do whatever it takes to have a child. It's not that Zouves, who is medical director at the San Franciscobased Pacific Fertility Centerone of the few in the country to offer its clients a money-back guaranteeis blind to what his patients are going through. On the contrary, he does an excellent job of recounting the physical, emotional, and financial toll that infertility treatment can take on his patients and their families. It's just that in a book that considers every possible obstacle to having a babyadvanced age, endometriosis, fibroids, cancer, vasectomy, low sperm count and/or motility, immune system problems, to name just a fewnearly every couple depicted here emerges from the infertility ordeal with at least one healthy newborn. To be sure, most of them had to go pretty far afield; many underwent multiple cycles of in vitro fertilization, others had to rely on sperm or egg donors. Some even resorted to surrogates. The details of their treatment are described unflinchingly: hundreds of hormone shots, multiple miscarriages, the heartbreak of being ``a little bit pregnant! after embryos are implanted, only to have the pregnancy vanish, and the irony of ``selective reduction,'' i.e., aborting one or more fetuses when fertility treatments work too well. For those grappling with infertility, Zouves's work, which makes the intricacies of biology understandable to the lay reader, offers a useful primer on cutting-edge science. And while it holds out much-needed hope to those who yearn for children, the book would have been more valuable had it reflected the reality that miracles do not happen every day. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This is an excellent book with a captive readership: the one percent of infertile couples who must resort to high technology to conceive children. Zouves, a medical director of a large San Francisco fertility practice, writes convincingly and with great feeling about seemingly impossible cases. The patients are as diverse as the procedures: lesbian and straight couples, older and younger couples, several of them adoptive parents seeking more children via intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and in vitro fertilization (IVF) with or without surrogacy and donor eggs. Zouves is himself the father of two children, one autistic; he displays real empathy for his patients, dealing as they do with a medical condition that alters every aspect of family life. Not only the infertile but their families and friends can benefit from this book; buy multiple copies. Highly recommended.ACatherine Arnott Smith, Ctr. for Biomedical Informatics, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Zouves and Sullivan describe the former's successful work with 20 infertile couples, and although some procedures are used by more than one couple, the story of each is unique. There are cases involving shared-owner ovum donation, various types of surrogate motherhood, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, and various combinations of techniques. One couple had experienced secondary infertility after successfully giving birth. One couple, at least, was originally attracted to Zouves because of his money-back guarantee. Different cases allow Zouves to look at egg donations from the donor's and the receiver's perspectives, and another presents an RN who donated three times because she so enjoyed bringing happiness to despairing couples who had often been through long and unpleasant procedures that failed. Among the most unusual cases are those of a gestational pregnancy involving two sisters and one that eventuated in twins for a lesbian couple. Throughout, the book is upbeat, lively, and free of unnecessary technical terms. William Beatty

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805060464
• ISBN 13: 9780805060461
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 266