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Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting by Elizabeth Bartholet (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.) A provocative look at how and why genetic connection is promoted to (in the author's view) the detriment of infertility patients and adoptive relationships stigmatized except when they are quasi or partial adoptions. A powerful argument for revamping the system and society's view of adoption.
Motherhood Deferred by Anne Taylor Fleming (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994 ) Journalist and feminist Fleming explores how as a leading-edge baby boomer she took advantage of the changes brought about by the women's movement to build a career, deferring motherhood only to find in her middle thirties that infertility loomed. Chapters detailing her battle with infertility through its most high tech options alternate with chapters discussing the role of baby-boom and feminist politics in her situation. Provocative!
Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness by Elaine Tyler May (New York: Basic Books, 1995) Examines attitudes toward and about voluntary and involuntary childlessness (both infertility and compulsory sterilization) from a historial, sociological perspective from colonial times to present, exploring both the "outside view" and the inside view" from witch trials to the eugenics movement, from raising children as a group effort for the common good to parenthood as personal satisfactions, from childlessness as religious punishment of women to feminism to high tech treatments for both males and females.
Designs on Life: Exploring the New Frontiers of Human Fertility by Robert Lee Hotz (New York: Pocket Books, 1991.) Award-winning investigative science reporter Hotz explores behind the scenes in research and IVF programs throughout the world, drug manufacturers, etc. weaving in the personal stories of patients. Must reading for advocates.
Pursuing Parenthood: Ethical Issues in Assisted Reproductive Technology by Paul Lauritzen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) A carefully reasoned but complex and academic in tone exploration of the ethics of assisted reproductive technology and other family building options and of the professionals who offer them to the infertile written by one who has himself dealt with infertility.
Credits: Patricia Irwin Johnston, MS
