Greg Bales

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

When it is complete you screw on the forest-green lid, write your name and your wife’s name on the label, put it all in a biohazard bag, and ring the buzzer. Along comes a woman, another nurse. She takes the bag and holds it up to the light. If you read the paperwork there is a request that you don’t make any jokes during this moment.

At the clinic where we did IVF, no such awkward handoffs as Paul Ford describes were possible: I would open a small metal door in the back of the masturbatorium, put the bag enclosing the no-longer-sterile vial on a shelf, close the door, and flip a switch that said “finished.” The lab technician behind the metal door would retrieve it in the privacy of her lab, and I would get dressed and try to sneak out as quietly as I could.

“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Paul Ford for The Morning News