Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Our World
Everything Conceivable: How Helped Reproduction Is Changing Our World Books
- ISBN13: 9781400044283
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Skyrocketing infertility rates and the accompanying explosion in reproductive technology are revolutionizing the American family and changing the way we reckon about parenthood, childbirth, and life itself. In this riveting work of investigative reporting, Liza Mundy, an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post, captures the human narratives, as well as the science, behind what is today a controversial, multibillion-dough industry, and examines how the huge social experiment that is helped reproduction is transforming our most basic relationships and even our destiny as a species.
Based on in-depth reporting from across the nation and nearly the world, using riveting anecdotal material from doctors, families, and children—many of them now adults—conceived through in vitro fertilization, Mundy looks at the phenomena made by helped reproduction and their ramifications. Never before in the history of humankind has it been possible for a woman to give birth to an infant who is genetically unrelated to her. Never before has it been possible for a woman to be the genetic mother of children to whom she has not given birth. Never before has the come forth of choice had such kaleidoscopic implications. If you support reproductive freedom, does that mean you support everything being offered in the reproductive marketplace? Thawing frozen embryos and letting them expire? Selecting the sex of your baby? Conceiving triplets and “reducing” the pregnancy down to twins? Everything Conceivable explores the private impact on individuals using helped reproduction to conceive, and the moral, ethical, and pragmatic decisions they make on their journey to parenthood. It looks at the vast social consequences: for sickbay neonatal wards, for family structure, for schools, for our notion of genetic relatedness and whether it matters, for adoption; for our nation as a whole, and how we reckon about the earliest human life-forms. The book explores questions of social justice: the ethics of buying or borrowing some part of the reproductive administer, as with egg donation and surrogacy. It looks at entirely new family structures being made by families who have conceived using sperm donors, so that children may have half-siblings nearly the people with whom they are, or are not, in contact. And it looks toward the future, to the impact today’s technology may have on appearance generations.
Fascinating, commanding, keenly experimental and reported, rich in private drama as well as in the science of evolution and reproduction, Liza Mundy’s Everything Conceivable is a groundbreaking consideration of the changes sweeping through our culture and the world.
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The author relies on the most controversial headlines rather than the “average” fertility patient. She sensationalizes something that is rather mundane in many ways.
Focusing on gay couples, HOMs, and other sensational tales even as selecting inaccurate pictures of the current state of the ART business in the USA leads to a misleading book. A better book is The Baby Business by Debora Spar. Though, she does fall small, Ms. Spar’s book is much more right and less sensationalistic.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book is a must-read for anyone who is considering having children. Even though I conceived two kids with no medical intervention, I am glad that I know more about the business of conception. Liza Mundy has done a fantastic job presenting the facts about the latest reproductive technologies. I hope every prospective mother reads this book before they plot their family.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a book about the transformation of the administer of human reproduction. It is a book about the whole business of Artificial Reproduction Technology (ART).It is a book about those people who seek to have children through ART and those who supply the services. It is rich in individual case- histories. And it gives a picture of a vast abandoned world which is playing a larger and larger part in the tale of mankind.
It is a book in which mankind is seen contending with unprecedented situations and questions.
Artifiicial Reproduction technologies which were first introduced to help infertile parents in a small time became means for enabling the creation of families in which only one mother was genetically connected to the child. After this the way became open for the unprecdented capacity of selecting of a ‘donor’ on the basis of certain desirable qualities. As the technology first developed in the liberal era following the passing of Roe-Wade there was a large degree of laissez- faire carelessness and exploitation in the development of the ‘Industry’.
The very administer of Artificial Reproduction makes a fundamental exchange in the situation of humanity. It is no longer necessary for there to be sexual and ideally loving relations between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to have children. This is in itself is such a revolutionary turn about in our situation and conception of ourselves that it seems to me mankind as a whole, and certainly the major religious traditions have not known how to connect this with their own habitual positions.
In any case this work is more a very realistic picture of what is happening in the world of Artificial Reproduction than it is anything else. It has been highly praised in all the reviews I have seen of it, as being clearly and comprehensibly written. It involves an exhaustive research in which many individual case- histories were traced. In the course of this it leads to the consideration of unprecedented situations, many of which make unique moral dilemnas.
Enormous moral dilemnas have developed from the new Industry. Consider the question of ‘frozen embryos’ the leftovers after other fertilized embryos of the same genetic link were employed. What does one do with the near five- hundred million such frozen embryos in the U.S.? It is the parents choice whether to donate them to other would be parents, or to research, or have them implanted in the mother. They too have the alternatives of maintenance them frozen or ‘disposing of them’. What is the moral status of any of the above decisions?
One vital side of this is the author’s look at the relatively abandoned private sector caught up in selling various technologies, and elements in the administer of reproduction.
For most readers a fantastic share of the interest will be in reading of the individual cases, of those desperate to have children. One major question of course is whether ‘pleased endings’ for prospective parents now will mean future well- being for the children caught up. Another major question of course is the overall effect on the human community as a whole. Those critical of the excessive and over-liberal use of these technologies claim children are being brought into their world whose futures will be fraught with perilous identity- confusions.
Those who judge in the importance of the two- mother nuclear family will be appalled at the disarray made by the new technologies.
Even those who strongly support the technologies can be troubled by the separation which occurs in so many cases between ‘genetic parents’ and ‘those who really raise the children.
The changes are very fantastic indeed. Those interested in the overall situation and meaning of what it is to be human would do well to read this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a fantastic book for anyone that has been forced to become an “Infertility Warrior” on their road to motherhood or fatherhood. It gives the history of artificial reproduction, the incredible scientific developments that allowed the IVF course of action to blossom into the everyday miracle and the continuing miracles. Lisa Mundy weaves the business, science and private tales very well to give what may possibly have been a science book color and personality. I have fought through years of infertility, 13 procedures and lost a fiance that couldn’t handle it by the side of the way. This was such an fascinating book for me to see the history, the behind the scenes business and the future of artificial reproduction. Well done!
Rating: 5 / 5
Even as our current technology may be some years away from the industrial cloning techniques of “Courageous New World” or the custom-optimized embryos of “Gattaca”, we can already store and manipulate the raw materials of embryo creation so that a woman can give birth to a child not genetically hers made from egg and sperm whose donors may no longer be living. Furthermore, with our increasing knowledge of the genetic contribution to disease and human traits and the availability of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to screen embryos before shoot in the uterus, we can not only screen for unwanted genetic traits, but also for desirable ones.
Liza Mundy explores these issues and many others in “Everything Conceivable: How Helped Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World”, a thorough and in-depth look at the science, business, do, ethics and implications of helped reproduction and correlated technologies. As a veteran science reporter, Mundy brings an detachment and nearness to her descriptions of the people and technology caught up in this growing business. As a mother, Mundy brings a humanity and compassion in her interviews with couples seeking reproductive help and the people, including donors, surrogates and doctors, who are willing to provide that help, for a fee.
Even as people actively seeking helped reproduction or those in the science and business of it might seem to have the most relevant interest in “Everything Conceivable”, everyone in society has a stake in these new reproductive technologies and their expansion of our habitual definitions of kinship; their effects on current society and future generations; and even their challenge to what it means to be human. Liza Mundy writes about all this with keen observation, insight and empathy, leaving the reader with not only a greater understanding of the science and business of helped reproduction and the people caught up, but also its ramifications to the rest of us and all of society.
Rating: 5 / 5