Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Our World (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: donor sibling registry, triplet connection, using sperm donation, United States, San Francisco, Growing Generations (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A revolution is taking place and it's being driven by the most fundamental of all human urges—the desire to reproduce. This revolution is the subject of Mundy's utterly fascinating book on assisted reproduction. The breadth and thoroughness of Mundy's investigation makes it nearly impossible to come away without having your opinions challenged if not changed altogether. Mundy, a feature writer for the Washington Post, combines a science reporter's objectivity with a mother's understanding, and she delivers her emotionally charged and often scientifically complex material in clear, bright and eminently readable prose. Mundy's research starts with the facts: 80 million people worldwide suffer from infertility; 500,000 frozen embryos exist in America alone; and fertility drugs are a $3-billion a year business. From there she interviews mothers, fathers, infertility doctors, surrogate mothers, egg donors, sperm donors and adult children conceived through surrogacy and in vitro fertilization. The picture that emerges is one of a social experiment so new and untested—legally, medically, ethically and socially—that it behooves us all to be as informed as possible. There couldn't be a better starting point than this book. 75,000 first printing. (Apr. 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Debora L. Spar

How do you baptize three small boys who sprang from two different mothers? What ritual can anoint their genetic mother, a young flight attendant who "donated" her eggs? In Everything Conceivable, this complicated dilemma is resolved by a thoughtful minister, who solemnly blesses the egg donor as an "angel" who by Jesus's "abiding grace helped to place them in the arms of their parents." After the ceremony, the flustered flight attendant is bustled off to a post-baptismal Mexican lunch, where she meets the extended family, bounces the other woman's babies on her knee and then flies home to Denver, wondering whether she might someday use the couple's leftover embryos for herself.

Welcome to the wild new world of reproduction, where traditional players in the nuclear family are tossed about like so many cards in a deck. In this well-researched and vividly detailed book, Liza Mundy follows dozens of topsy-turvy tales from the reproductive edge. There is, for example, the story of Doug Okun and Eric Ethington, two gay men determined to conceive and raise a child. They visit a swank surrogacy agency, compile a marketing profile of themselves and eventually discover Ann Nelson, a mother of four from West Virginia, who agrees to carry their child. Then they start searching for another woman to provide the eggs, reasoning, as Mundy tells us, that "of course she would have to be fabulous, your basic Ivy League supermodel."

When these eggs don't take, Okun and Ethington start again, becoming even pickier in the process: "The thing that became very, very important to me," Ethington recalls, "was music. Music and sports, as an indicator of well-roundedness." They finally find their perfect woman, fertilize her eggs with a mixture of their sperm, fly Nelson back to California, and then watch as four embryos are transferred to her womb. Thirty-five weeks later, she delivers Elizabeth Ruby and Sophia Rose, biological twins and genetic half-sisters born of two mothers and raised by two dads.

Although there is not much in Everything Conceivable that is truly new, Mundy, a reporter for The Washington Post, tells her tales in a fresh voice and with a keen eye for detail. People reveal all sorts of intimacies to her, and she plays them back for us to see. The result is a largely uplifting read, full of joyful parents, gorgeous babies and embryos that generally survive.

Yet the sum of all this happiness is oddly disquieting. For while Mundy does not hesitate to give us the gory details, she seems resolutely determined not to draw any broader conclusions from them. Instead, agonizing decisions and life-threatening situations are treated almost literally parenthetically, as with the three boys conceived by donor eggs: "After the birth of the triplets," Mundy reports matter-of-factly, "which was horrific and nearly fatal -- Laura hemorrhaged badly after the triple C-section, losing an enormous amount of blood -- Laura emailed Kendra photos of the newborns. Kendra put the pictures up in her townhouse. She e-mailed them to friends." Now, it's nice to learn that the egg donor delighted in her far-off progeny and that she and the birth mother have become friends. But somehow the material inside the dashes seems more deserving of our regard. A young woman had three embryos transferred to her womb. She hemorrhaged during delivery and nearly died. Yet these details are bundled oddly away.

An equally frightening subplot runs through the story of Okun, Ethington and Nelson. While the two men are dashing across the country to attend their daughters' birth, Nelson starts hemorrhaging. Doctors race to stop the bleeding and ultimately perform an emergency hysterectomy to save her life. An unfortunate accident? Perhaps. But Nelson, we learn, was overweight. She had delivered her own children by Caesarean section and was at increased risk for uterine rupture. Yet the doctors and prospective fathers still agreed to transfer four embryos to her, creating a predictably dangerous pregnancy.

It is in not dwelling on these accidents-in-waiting that Mundy's book falls short. She seems so enchanted by her subjects and so sympathetic to their plights that she refuses to touch more than briefly on the questions that their stories raise. Should any woman -- and particularly a paid surrogate -- have four embryos transferred to her womb? Should fertility doctors be allowed to create such high-risk pregnancies, passing the potential dangers to the obstetricians who eventually treat these patients? And what about the plight of others dragged along in the harrowing quest for high-tech babies?

For this reader, the most poignant stories of Everything Conceivable concerned the peripheral players: David Nelson, Ann's husband, who stood photographing Okun and Ethington's newborn daughters while his wife lay nearly dying from their birth; and in another case reported by Mundy, Megan, a little girl whose mother gave birth to premature triplets. Two years after their arrival, Mundy reports, the triplets are doing well. But Megan is not. Her parents are getting divorced and she is in therapy, trying to cope with the sibling abundance that has been thrust upon her.

Even as reproductive technologies advance at warp speed, discussions of reproduction slip easily into timeworn patterns. We want babies to be born healthy. We want families to cherish their offspring. And we want to conclude, as Mundy does, that the critical element of the baby-making equation, regardless of the technology involved, is love. The problem with love, though, in parenthood and elsewhere, is that it is too often blind. Parents are entranced by their offspring and unwilling to question the mechanism of their conception. In some deep pocket of their souls, they need to believe that the particular child they have acquired is precisely the child they were destined to have: the only magical mixing of egg and sperm that could ever have made sense. Yet when science intrudes so heavily into the realm of nature, an impartial observer should be moved to feel not only compassion for others' offspring but also some sense of excess.

How many babies are too many for a family to handle? When is a mother too old or sick to conceive? And how much choice should parents have in determining their offspring's traits? Everything Conceivable pushes us toward these questions, but leaves us tantalizingly short of answers.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (April 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400044286
• ISBN-13: 978-1400044283
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #676,911 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As interesting as a New York Times Magazine special feature, July 17, 2007

By	Veronica Singh (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews

For those who don't know anything about the field of assisted reproductive technologies, this serves as a great, though rather wordy, introduction to the $5-billion U.S. fertility industry. Mundy's style is engaging in general, and the content is captivating on its own because it is so sci-fi to most people. This book is packed full with personal stories from the front lines of "investigative reporting": meet real egg donors and gestational surrogates and their recipients, agonize with real families who are deciding which of their triplets to "selectively reduce," meet real lesbian couples who conceived with donor sperm, etc.

One thing that I didn't like about this book is that Mundy missed, it seems to me, an opportunity to give more of a voice to the children conceived with donor gametes, and more consideration and thought to their rights, problems and concerns. In the one chapter that she does have on the subject of children's rights, the children themselves actually don't get much of a voice. Much of the chapter is again devoted to the perspective of parents and professionals in the fertility industry, who also get the whole rest of the book. The fact that the children only get what is in essence half or less than half of a chapter in a whole book about repro tech is in itself very telling. It seems that the resulting children are often an afterthought in an industry that is geared entirely to satisfying the desires of infertile adults.

The other thing I didn't like was Mundy's occasional editorializing in this book. She is obviously in favor of using the reproductive technologies she writes about, she is pro-choice, and also clearly a Democrat -- and whenever she talks about anyone who has different opinions they are inevitably labeled "far Right". But if that doesn't bother you or you can get past it, then this book is a fairly good read - and certainly an eye-opening first-person account of an enormous industry that most people are not too aware exists.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gracefully written, meticulously researched, compassionately reported, May 15, 2007

By	Nell Minow (USA) - See all my reviews

Gracefully written, meticulously researched, compassionately reported, this is a Sorcerer's Apprentice story of technology that has vastly outstripped anyone's judgment. For once, the problem is not political or corporate corruption -- the failure to consider the most fundamental notions of policy or ethics is due, more than any other cause, to the overwhelming passion of people who want to be parents, as Mundy notes more committed and unselfish than any other people classified as "patients" in our health care system. Filled with heart-wrenching -- and heart-lifting -- stories, scientific and technological developments that seem like something out of a comic book but are going on right now in your neighborhood, unforgettable characters, mind-bogglingly difficult choices, and Mundy's own wisdom, this is one of the finest and most important non-fiction books I have read in years.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating for all! A must read!, August 1, 2007

By	WpC "WpC" (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews

"Everything Conceivable" by Liza Mundy is fascinating to say the very least. This book takes the reader on a thorough, unbiased trip through the world of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). As Liza Mundy proves with every turn of the page "reproductive technology is mirroring social change, but it also enables and drives that change, in ways that will affect every single citizen, and probably already have." Thus this book should intrigue everyone, both male and female, fertile and infertile because these issues indeed "affect every single citizen."
Liza literally takes the reader with her into reproductive clinics where doctors are performing selective reduction or stirring up humans in petri dishes. She brings the reader into the homes of the loving parents who's child came from those petri dishes and talks with both male and female gamete donors. "So broad is the patient base, and so eager is the field to accommodate them, that assisted reproduction has gone from being an oddball fringe technology to being perhaps the most socially influential reproductive technology of the twenty-first century." This exsquisite compilation is not just of facts and figures but stories full of raw emotion, real people, real life right here and now with consequences so far reaching that soon no one will escape them.
Meet same sex couples, their egg donors and surrogates. Meet the children of IVF and hear how they feel about not being biologially related to one of their parents. Hear tales of motherly exchanges via a website dedicated to mothers and children of sperm donor #1476. Ask yourself how you feel about a man donating sperm to his infertile son's wife so that his son will be raising his literal half brother. The situations are endless as are the opportunities, decisions, and repercussions.
A scientific masterpiece, that reads like the most captivating novel, this book begs the answers to questions such as when does life begin? What is life? and morally what can and should be done with it?
Along with bringing these soul-searching questions to the surface this book is simply an entertaining read. On all levels, this book is a must read!