Medicine: Advice to the Childless

The estimated five million U.S. couples who want children but don't seem to be able to have them were offered a lot of expert advice last week. Unfortunately, the experts did not entirely agree.

Writing in Fertility in Marriage (Farrar, Straus; $3), Dr. Louis Portnoy of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital put his faith in the basal temperature curve, which drops lower each month at about the time an ovum (egg) is released by the ovary, then rises sharply again, thus marking the most favorable time for conception. This is nonsense, snaps Dr. Edmond J....

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