It was not that long ago that “test tube babies” only existed in science fiction. I remember my shock when, in 2007, one of my students at Wellesley College told me that she was an IVF (in vitro fertilization) baby. “The technology couldn’t be that old, could it?” I thought. In The Pursuit of Parenthood: Reproductive Technology from Test-Tube Babies to Uterus Transplants, historian Margaret Marsh and OBGYN Wanda Ronner demonstrate that IVF — in which an ovum or ova are removed via surgery from a woman’s ovaries, fertilized with sperm in a petri dish, and the resulting embryo or embryos are reimplanted in her uterus — has long since come of age, and deserves historical analysis. The sisterly duo present a lively, panoramic history of IVF and its associated reproductive technologies and social arrangements…
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