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Title: WHO STOLE MY FERTILITY
Post by: mensfe_admin
Who Stole Fertility?
With a growing business in the medical field of fertility products, are Americans as infertile as they'd like to believe? Or is the industry a response to the new impatient nature of the nation?
By Virginia Rutter, Tom Arma, published on March 01, 1996 - last reviewed on October 01, 2009
Contrary to popular belief, there is no infertility crisis sweeping the nation. We've just lost all conception of what it takes to conceive. Reproductive technology has made us impatient with nature. So for increasing numbers of couples the creation of a new human being has become a strangely dehumanizing process.
My great-aunt Emily and great-uncle Harry never had kids, and nobody in our family talked about it. Growing up, I knew not to ask. It would have been impolite, as crass as asking about their income or their weight. The message was clear: If they didn't have kids, they couldn't have them, and talking about it would only be humiliating.
How times have changed. Today, a couple's reproductive prospects—or lack of them—are not only apt to be a conversation topic at your average dinner party, they're the subject of countless news stories illustrating our nationwide infertility "crisis."
In an infertility cover story last year, Newsweek reported that more than 3 million American couples would seek procreative help in 1995. Diagnostic tests, hormone treatments, fertility drugs, and assisted-reproduction techniques with names like in vitro fertilization (IVF), gamete intrafallopian transfers (GIFT), intrauterine insemination (IUI), zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)—to name the top five procedures—have become as much a part of the reproductive process as the more poetic aspects of family making. While some of those 3 million-plus couples were legitimate candidates for the host of high-tech options now available to them, most wound up needing only low-tech assistance, such as boxer shorts instead of briefs.