Photo: Trace Ramsey
This essay is from from Belle Boggs touching new book, The Art of Waiting.
I visit my reproductive endocrinologist?s office in May and notice, in the air surrounding the concrete-and-steel hospital complex, a strange absence of sound. There are no tall trees to catch the wind or harbor the cicadas, and on the pedestrian bridge from the parking deck, everyone walks quickly, head down, intent on making their appointments. In the waiting room, I test the leaf surface of a potted ficus with my fingernail and am reassured to find that it is real: green, living.
My name is called, and a doctor I?ve never met performs a scan of my ovaries. I take notes in a blank book I?ve filled with four-leaf clovers found on my river walks: Two follicles" Three" Chance of success 15 to 18 percent. Doing whatever it takes to have a baby has come to mean in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure developed in the 1970s that involves the hormonal manipulation of a woman?s cycle followed by the harvest and fertilization of her eggs, which are transferred as embryos to her uterus. More than 5 million babies worldwide have been born through IVF, which has become a multibillion-dollar industry.
?Test-tube baby,? says another woman at the infertility support group, a young ER doctor who has given herself five at-home inseminations and is thinking of moving on to IVF. ?I really hate that term. It?s a baby. That?s all it is.? She has driven 70 miles to talk to seven other wo...