Designs on Life: Exploring the New Frontiers of Human Fertility

By manipulating human sperm and egg outside the womb, or by performing microsurgery on an embryo's cells, Jacques Cohen, a quiet, determined embryologist-sculptor in Atlanta, overcomes the chemical and physical barriers that often prevent pregnancy. New techniques like Cohen's are needed in the booming commercial fertility industry. As the 1990s began, only one out of 30 embryos transferred from lab to womb resulted in a live baby, and these infants have a high rate of heart and spinal-cord defects. Hotz, science writer for the Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Journal , interviewed hundreds of patients and practitioners in infertility clinics. This report captures the human dramas of couples desperate to conceive, and grapples with the legal, ethical and societal dilemmas posed by genetic screening of embryos, by a daughter's donating eggs so her mother can conceive, and by a divorcing couple's fighting over frozen embryos. (Nov.)