Awards

• Short-listed for PROSE Award for Best Book in History of Science, Medicine and Technology 2020 (United States)

Overview

"A wide-ranging history of assisted reproductive technologies and their ethical implications. Finalist of the PROSE Award for Best Book in History of Science, Medicine and Technology by the Association of American Publishers Since the 1978 birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in England, more than eight million children have been born with the help of assisted reproductive technologies. From the start, they have stirred controversy and raised profound questions: Should there be limits to the lengths to which people can go to make their idea of family a reality? Who should pay for treatment? How can we ensure the ethical use of these technologies? And what can be done to address the racial and economic disparities in access to care that enable some to have children while others go without? In The Pursuit of Parenthood, historian Margaret Marsh and gynecologist Wanda Ronner seek to answer these challenging questions. Bringing their unique expertise in gender history and women's health to the subject, Marsh and Ronner examine the unprecedented means—liberating for some and deeply unsettling for others—by which families can now be created. Beginning with the early efforts to create embryos outside a woman's body and ending with such new developments as mitochondrial replacement techniques and uterus transplants, the authors assess the impact of contemporary reproductive technology in the United States. In this volume, we meet the scientists and physicians who have developed these technologies and the women and men who have used them. Along the way, the book dispels a number of fertility myths, offers policy recommendations that are intended to bring clarity and judgment to this complicated medical history, and reveals why the United States is still known as the ""Wild West"" of reproductive medicine."

Full Product Details

9781421429847

Table of Contents

Reviews

Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner are clear in what they advocate . . . they are wonderfully level-headed guides. -Michele Pridmore-Brown, Times Literary Supplement The 'infertility sisters' have done it again! This book is a page-turning history of how new reproductive technologies and treatments have transformed women's experiences with infertility. Marsh and Ronner mix a medical narrative, enlivened with quotations from interviews with many of the physicians involved, with moving stories of individual women and families, and with discussion of the social and political contexts in which changes occurred. They provide a rich and absorbing account that informs current debates. -Judith Walzer Leavitt, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1980 This book is much more than a medical and technological history of infertility treatment. It is that, but it is also a story of generosity and greed, joy and sorrow, triumph and tragedy, politics and policies, miracles and mistakes. It is a story that is both moving and enlightening. -Elaine Tyler May, University of Minnesota, author of Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness It is rare that one runs into a book this prescient on what was to be the technology that vanquished barrenness. Epochal if well-grounded, the searing, indeed gripping, narrative remains ever-captivating from prologue to epilogue. -Eli Y. Adashi, MD, MS, The Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University Medicine's ability to help infertile couples has outpaced American society's willingness to assess the ramifications of, and develop regulations for, assisted reproductive technologies. Marsh and Ronner describe this fascinating history from all angles-the social, the scientific, the medical, and the personal. They have written not only a history of the complexities and consequences of infertility treatment, but also a history of the triumphs, tragedies, and moral ambiguities inherent in modern American medicine. -Jacqueline H. Wolf, Ohio University, author of Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology, and Consequence Another triumph from this complementary pairing-the 'infertility sisters' have produced an accessible, sensitive, and thought-provoking history of assisted reproduction in contemporary America. Tracing the perspectives of both patients and practitioners within their social and political context, this controversial and fascinating history is a must-read for anyone with an academic or personal interest in infertility and its treatment. -Gayle Davis, The University of Edinburgh, coeditor of Abortion across Borders: Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services The dynamic sister duo Marsh and Ronner are at it again, seamlessly weaving historical and gynecological perspectives to tell new stories about the age-old issue of infertility. The Pursuit of Parenthood focuses on the crucial issue of technological interventions into reproduction from the twentieth century to the present. This book will stand as an essential history of assisted reproductive technologies, providing a fascinating and eminently-readable overview of the social and political changes shaping modern-day family formation in the context of infertility. -Rene Almeling, Yale University, author of Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm An accurate portrayal of the history of the pioneers of assisted reproductive technologies, combined with a fair assessment of current ethical issues and tales of developments to come, all presented with a humanistic bent. An immediate classic. -Alan DeCherney, MD, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development / National Institutes of Health An engaging, well-written, and well-researched account of all aspects of reproductive technology over the past few decades: political, social, and ethical. Marsh and Ronner are the ideal authors for such a book. Here, they carefully tease out the multiple factors that contributed to the current messy state of assisted reproduction. The Pursuit of Parenthood is accessible, important, and very timely. -Wendy Kline, Purdue University, author of Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth In this timely and engaging study of the past, present, and future of assisted reproduction, historian Margaret Marsh and physician Wanda Ronner have marshalled their complementary strengths to sound a clarion call for a saner approach to the business of making babies in America. -Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, University of California, San Francisco, author of The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America

Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner are clear in what they advocate... they are wonderfully level-headed guides. --Michele Pridmore-Brown Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Margaret Marsh is a university professor of history at Rutgers University. Wanda Ronner is a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. They are the authors of The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present and The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution.

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