Designs on Life: Exploring the New Frontiers of Human Fertility

Discusses the work of a embroyologist pioneering in the field of human fertility and introduces the couples who will endure any amount of financial and emotional strain for the chance to conceive a child

By manipulating human sperm and egg outside the womb, or by performing microsurgery on an embryo's cells, Jacques Cohen, a quiet, determined embryologist-sculptor in Atlanta, overcomes the chemical and physical barriers that often prevent pregnancy. New techniques like Cohen's are needed in the booming commercial fertility industry. As the 1990s began, only one out of 30 embryos transferred from lab to womb resulted in a live baby, and these infants have a high rate of heart and spinal-cord defects. Hotz, science writer for the Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Journal , interviewed hundreds of patients and practitioners in infertility clinics. This report captures the human dramas of couples desperate to conceive, and grapples with the legal, ethical and societal dilemmas posed by genetic screening of embryos, by a daughter's donating eggs so her mother can conceive, and by a divorcing couple's fighting over frozen embryos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hotz, science writer and editor for The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, fascinatingly explores human reproduction and the new technology. The author gives his story high emotional impact by focusing on an infertility clinic where would-be parents ride the roller coaster of hope and despair and where embryologists manipulate the very stuff of life. But there's much more here than human drama. Hotz looks at what's been happening in human embryology since the birth of the first test-tube baby about a dozen years ago. It's a field unregulated and unfunded by the federal government, a legal void in which ethicists, biologists, judges, and legislators struggle with questions of right and wrong, responsibility and risk, privacy and public policy. Issues undreamed of a few years ago (Are embryos human beings or property? Whose claim to parenthood is greater, the genetic mother's or the birth mother's?) have made their way into dozens of courtrooms across the country, and ever-more complex questions are likely to arise. The abortion debate, with its differing views on the question of when human life begins, complicates the picture, hampering the research that could make technology- assisted conception safer and easier. Hotz wends his way deftly through this tangle, offering no solutions but pointing out problems society must recognize and deal with. A highly skilled writer, Hotz has done his research well and made the technology and its practitioners come alive: a noteworthy addition to the literature on reproductive choice. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Hotz, science writer of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution , tells stories gathered in over 300 interviews with both clinicians and patients at 12 fertility clinics, describing the current state of assisted human reproduction over the last ten to 15 years. He recounts successes as well as failures; the most moving sections of his book deal with the experiences of several couples whose marriages have been strained as they have repeatedly tried new procedures and hoped in vain to be in the successful 20 percent. Hotz is interested in the moral issues of the new fertility technology, but since he interviewed only people involved in it, there is no clear statement of opposing views. Hotz also slams government officials, both in the United States and abroad, for failure to oversee the research, avoidance of the issues, and apathy. Recommended for consumer health collections.
- Eric D. Albright, Galter Health Sciences Lib., Northwestern Univ., Chicago
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.