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Everything Conceivable
Liza Mundy
How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World
Knopf
May 2007
On Sale: April 24, 2007
432 pages
ISBN: 1400044286
EAN: 9781400044283
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Skyrocketing infertility rates and the accompanying
explosion in reproductive technology are revolutionizing the
American family and changing the way we think 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-dollar industry, and
examines how the huge social experiment that is assisted
reproduction is transforming our most basic relationships
and even our destiny as a species. Based on in-depth reporting from across the nation and
around 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 created by assisted 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 parent of children to
whom she has not given birth. Never before has the issue 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 personal
impact on individuals using assisted 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 hospital 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 think about the earliest human
life-forms. The book explores questions of social justice:
the ethics of buying or borrowing some part of the
reproductive process, as with egg donation and surrogacy. It
looks at entirely new family structures being created by
families who have conceived using sperm donors, so that
children may have half-siblings around the country with whom
they are, or are not, in contact. And it looks toward the
future, to the impact today’s technology may have on coming
generations. Fascinating, commanding, keenly observed and reported, rich
in personal 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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