HATCHING

A look at how mothers are made.

In 2015, Quilter went to an in vitro fertilization clinic with the goal of freezing her eggs. At 35, describing herself as a “white, able-bodied, bisexual, middle-class woman,” she was ambivalent about motherhood but, wanting to keep her options open, decided to take advantage of the new technology. Melding intimate memoir and enlightening medical history, Quilter recounts the unexpected journey that began with that visit. Advances in reproductive technology, she knew, have given women—that is, “white cisgender women who can afford it”—myriad choices: “We can fall pregnant without sperm entering the cervix; fall pregnant with eggs that have been harvested from our own bodies years before; develop in our uterus or someone else’s a child that isn’t genetically ours.” But, she discovered, her own choice was limited. She did not have enough eggs to freeze; it was unlikely that she could become pregnant; and if she did manage to conceive, she would probably miscarry early. Devastated, Quilter became intensely focused on having a baby. Her immersion in IVF became both personal (lying on rumpled paper sheets, undergoing scores of ultrasounds, injecting herself with hormones) and intellectual, as she investigated innovations “for viewing and manipulating female-identified bodies” from the 16th century on. As she shares her frustrating yet hopeful quest, she also offers a history of gynecology, birth control, and attitudes and laws regarding abortion, adoption, surrogacy, and embryo donation. She profiles researchers and physicians, including the two men who created the technology that led to the birth, in 1980, of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown. Quilter considers the views of angry feminists who rose up in the 1980s to deride IVF for affirming “a conservative, heterosexual, consumer-oriented vision of a nuclear family.” Though sympathetic, the author never loses sight of the deep complexities inherent in the issue of fertility.

A sensitive, politically astute examination of reproduction.