Confidence and Consequences
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
From Liza Mundy, Everything Conceivable:
Even today, there is enormous uncertainty with every transfer of more than one embryo. That’s because, for all the ballyhooed advances in the field, doctors and embryologists still have no idea which embryos, if any, have the ability to turn into children. A patient can undergo three IVF attempts and have all of them fail. The fourth time her doctor might decide to transfer five embryos; this time, all five might implant. … Here’s the important thing: doctors still have no reliable assay, or test, to identify which embryo among many is the embryo with the ability to develop into a fetus. They have no way of sorting good from bad, winner from loser, wheat from chaff. When doctors tell a patient that an embryo is “good,” or that it’s graded “A,” it is an educated guess, to put it mildly. (227)
I suppose I should be glad that, no matter whether it takes place in the fallopian tube or the petri dish, conception is only the first of many truly random events in life. But still, it is disappointing—to say the least—to realzie I am planning to uproot my life and move cross-country in order to put my sperm in the hands of doctors who have no better guarantee than that an embryo looks sexy to them.
Mundy goes on to say that one of the reasons there is no good test is because of the federal ban on embryo research. Which is to say: paradoxically, the federal ban on embryo research, which is intended to halt the wanton creation and destruction of so-called “Microscopic Americans,” prevents us from from knowing whether embryos could even become Visible Americans in the first place. To limit knowledge is to multiply ignorance, as they say.
