Monday, August 28, 2006

Who Stole Fertility?

With a growing business in the medical field of fertility products, are Americans as infertile as they'd like to believe? Or is the industry a response to the new impatient nature of the nation?

Contrary to popular belief, there is no infertility crisis sweeping the nation. We've just lost all conception of what it takes to conceive. Reproductive technology has made us impatient with nature. So for increasing numbers of couples the creation of a new human being has become a strangely dehumanizing process.


In an infertility cover story last year, Newsweek reported that more than 3 million American couples would seek procreative help in 1995. Diagnostic tests, hormone treatments, fertility drugs, and assisted-reproduction techniques with names like in vitro fertilization (IVF), gamete intrafallopian transfers (GIFT), intrauterine insemination (IUI), zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)—to name the top five procedures—have become as much a part of the reproductive process as the more poetic aspects of family making. While some of those 3 million-plus couples were legitimate candidates for the host of high-tech options now available to them, most wound up needing only low-tech assistance, such as boxer shorts instead of briefs.

Full article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19960301-000031.html

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"In 2003, 102,249 babies were born to women over 40 in the US - 5,769 were from donor egg."


Can you cite where that statistic comes from? Very curious, as I was told nowhere near that number of babies are born to women over 40.