The medical practice known as Reproductive Biology Associates, located in the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody, is pretty typical of the 315 fertility clinics in the U.S. and of the hundreds more in other countries around the world. Most of its patients--couples, mainly, but also single women--are here on this crisp, bright autumn day because they have tried in vain to have babies the old-fashioned way. Now they hope that medical science can help them satisfy that most basic of instincts, programmed into the brain and body by millions of years of evolution: the urge to bear children.
The depth of that feeling is shown in the expressions of anticipation and determination on the patients' faces, in the hands clasped tightly together, in the urgent, hushed murmurs of their voices. And the evidence that their hope may be realized is displayed prominently all around them: the hallway is lined with bulletin boards covered with the photographs of babies born to men and women who have sat in the clinic over the years.
Yet the one set of pictures that would make clear how R.B.A. stands out from other fertility practices has never been posted. In October, a patient here gave birth to twin boys conceived from eggs--another woman's--that had been frozen for more than two years. Unlike Bobbi McCaughey, this woman could not be helped by fertility drugs. She had suffered ovarian failure and could produce no eggs, no matter how much medication she took. Her best option would have been to accept a fresh egg from a donor. But she had agreed to this experimental procedure instead, on the condition that her privacy would be jealously guarded.
If she anticipated that the world might be, well, curious about her case, she was right. Infertility rates in industrialized countries have been rising for three decades, mostly as a result of women delaying childbirth. From 1988 to 1995 alone, the number of American women of childbearing age who suffered from fertility problems jumped from 4.9 million to 6.1 million, a 25% increase. Any breakthrough that could do something about this trend would be big news indeed.
And this birth--the first of its kind in the U.S. and one of the first in the world--wasn't just any breakthrough. A woman's eggs are more fragile than a man's sperm, and over the years, attempts to freeze and thaw them have almost always ended in failure. R.B.A.'s success, though it may not have been quite as dramatic as the birth of septuplets, within days had made headlines all over the world. Within weeks, the Atlanta clinic had fielded calls from fertility experts and infertile couples as far away as England and Germany.
No wonder. Doctors have been trying for centuries to improve on nature's way of perpetuating the human species. The first successful artificial insemination took place during the presidency of George Washington. And since 1978, when the world's first test-tube baby was born, researchers have assembled a battery of medicines and high-tech procedures that have utterly transformed the treatment of infertility. More than 33,000 babies have been born in the U.S. thanks to in-vitro (literally, "in glass") fertilization, or IVF--nearly 7,000 in 1994 alone, the most recent year for which numbers are available.