The Business of IVF: How Human Eggs Went from Simple Cells to a Valuable Commodity

I think they collected […] maybe, six eggs. I think we got four embryos out of that […] One was transferred and three were frozen. So, the fresh cycle didn’t work. Tried a frozen one, didn’t work. Went to try the third frozen and they told me that one didn’t survive unfreezing, so then we had one left and that didn’t work, so we had no embryos left. So we did a fresh egg cycle again, and they got even less this time […] So I was thinking this is all going to be wasting time. But […] I think they fertilised four eggs, and then there was only one viable one, which is my baby.

Eva, a teacher in her early 30s, describes in my recent book The Oocyte Economy: the Changing Meaning of Human Eggs, a very common experience for women who have fertility treatment.

Many women and couples, encouraged by success stories and marketing, hope their years of unsuccessful attempts to conceive a child naturally are over, and fertility treatment will work.

Assisted reproductive technologies cover a...