A Thought-Provoking Volume Traces the Medical, Social, and Political Histories of In Vitro Fertilization

August 27, 2019

(Science) – Major academic figures admonish “immoral experiments on the unborn.” An advertisement in The New York Times cautions about the “unknowable risks to human lives.” A government official calls for an ethics board to investigate “attempts to control the genetic makeup of offspring.” No, these are not the latest outcries over germline gene editing. The concerns raised above came from debates in the 1970s about a technology many of us now take for granted: in vitro fertilization (IVF). In their illuminating and highly readable new book, The Pursuit of Parenthood, historian Margaret Marsh and physician Wanda Ronner tell the medical, social, and political story of IVF from its prehistory in the mid-1900s to the present day, sweeping in adjacent technologies toward the book’s end.