Surrogacy and Egg Donation Lawyer & Attorney : Theresa Erickson : Erickson Law Firm : Practicing Reproductive and Gestational Carrier Law

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/20/arts/IDLEDE21.php Everything Conceivable How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World By Liza Mundy 406 pages. $26.95. Alfred A. Knopf; ?20. Allen Lane. At the start of this lucid, mostly approving look at how humans are tinkering with the age-old project of reproducing ourselves, Liza Mundy meets one of the British scientists whose tenacity in perfecting in vitro fertilization made possible the birth, nearly 30 years ago, of the first test-tube baby. The embryologist Robert Edwards charms her, and not just with his enduring zest for the procedure he helped invent. "Eye hoop they all have babies!" he declares in what Mundy, a writer for The Washington Post Magazine, calls his "wonderfully nonestablishment, workingman's burr." "What coood be better than a baby?" That rhetorical question sums up an essential principle of Mundy's book: that "having children and loving children is an unstoppable urge; that humans, or many humans, have an overpowering need to have - to be - a family." Yet while "Everything Conceivable" is based on the proposition that people crave babies, it has a larger thesis to prove: that the increasingly complicated ways people are going about making babies is transforming babies and the world. Mundy seeks to make sense of assisted reproduction, a sprawling topic that now includes lesbian and single mothers who use sperm (and sometimes egg) donors, gay men who enlist surrogates and couples who "adopt" one of the nearly half-million frozen human embryos stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen across the United States. Until the late 1970s, the term "assisted reproduction" referred to a short list of infertility treatments, among them artificial insemination, with donor sperm often supplied by an anonymous medical student, and drugs that induced ovulation. Then, Edwards and his partner, the surgeon Patrick Steptoe, pulled off the delicate task of fertilizing a human egg outside the body, coaxing it into a multicelled embryo and transferring it to a woman's womb, where it implanted. The resulting birth of Louise Brown in 1978 changed everything, at least for many whose path to parenthood had been blocked by infertility, age or sexual orientation. Within a decade, men with low sperm counts could father genetic offspring by means of ICSI, or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a type of in vitro fertilization in which a sharpened pipette launches sperm into egg. A woman with aging eggs might gestate an embryo produced by her husband's sperm and a young donor's oocyte, thereby bearing his child - or children, since in vitro pregnancies often result in multiple births. Partly as a result of the increased use of this technology, the number of twins born in the United States from 1980 to 2003 rose 75 percent. Considering the vastly broadened scope of assisted reproduction, Mundy's belief in its transformative power is unsurprising. She argues that these reproductive miracles, medicine's response to cultural shifts like later childbearing and the tendency of some men to postpone "commitment" (women who wait for the ideal spouse are called "independent"), have set off what one doctor described as "a huge social experiment." Maybe. Consider the case of Doug Okun and Eric Ethington, whose adored twin girls were conceived with the help of a Los Angeles agency that serves the growing ranks of "would-be gay dads." Following the protocol of West Coast clinics, the couple chose a young egg donor from candidates screened for looks, family health history and SAT scores: "What are you going to do," Ethington says, "get someone with a 1550, or are you going to cheat your child and get them a mom with a 1210?" Next they contracted with a surrogate - a married mother of four (as well as a fifth child she bore for another gay couple), with whom they would develop a deep bond - to carry their children. In all, building the Okun-Ethington family involved two in vitro cycles, at least $100,000 and a dangerous hemorrhage by their surrogate, whose ability to deliver twins safely after having undergone five previous Caesarean sections might have been inadequately vetted. Yet the men achieved their hearts' desire, coming as close as medically possible to having children together. Read: biological children. Just as they had hoped, one daughter turned out to be Doug's genetic offspring, the other Eric's. In short, the men took an arduous, costly route to gain the traditional satisfaction of seeing themselves in their children's faces. On the evidence of Mundy's book, the great gift of assisted reproduction isn't just that it creates longed-for babies, but that it lets all sorts of people achieve the same goal of having genetically connected offspring. Indeed, some of the case histories here, meant to illustrate Mundy's thesis that advances in reproductive technology have thrown the world into flux, seem more useful as backup for claims that biology remains destiny, that human nature hasn't budged since the Stone Age. Click Here for rest of article: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/20/arts/IDLEDE21.php ?