cover image Expecting Miracles: On the Path of Hope from Infertility to Parenthood

Expecting Miracles: On the Path of Hope from Infertility to Parenthood

Christo Zouves. Henry Holt & Company, $25 (266pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-6046-1

Motivated by the desire to have a child, many couples have overcome infertility problems with medical intervention. Zouves, who is the medical director at the Pacific Coast Fertility Center, now recounts, with the assistance of Sullivan, a reporter for the Spokane, Ore., Spokesman-Review, many stories of the women and men he has treated by performing in vitro fertilization, by ISCI (the direct injection of a single sperm into an egg), by implanting frozen embryos and by recommending the use of egg donors and surrogates who are paid to bear a child for the infertile couples. However, with the exception of Carol and her husband Steve--who decided to adopt after becoming psychologically exhausted by Carol's painful and expensive fertility treatments--all of Zouves's anecdotes end with ecstatic parents who bring home a brand new baby. Given that these technological procedures have a high failure rate, it is difficult not to view this account as a rosy advertisement for the services of the author's clinic. Several of the cases suggest that the doctor rarely turns down anyone who expresses a desire to have a child and can back it up with the financial wherewithal to gamble on new medical technologies. Zouves includes descriptions of how he helped a couple in their 50s to have a child and how he treated a menopausal woman who had a history of breast cancer with dangerous hormones in the hope that she would become pregnant. Even more disquieting is his spirited defense of the fertility clinic's money-back guarantee program, which the AMA has condemned as exploitive and misleading. (Sept.)