Chapter One

Chapter One: The New Reproductive Landscape

"Eye Hoop They All Have Babies"

Every industrial convention has its own eccentric flavor, and the 2005 gathering of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine was no exception. That year the annual meeting of American fertility doctors was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of Canadian fertility doctors; the massive conference, which took place in Montreal over five days in October, was attended by emissaries from North America as well as from England, France, Europe, Japan, China, Africa, India, Asia, Israel: anywhere that humans live and wish, as humans usually do, to be fruitful and multiply. So numerous were the babymakers that airport immigration was bogged down and the city's downtown was transformed; the hospitality rooms of the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth were booked for events like "Cocktails with the Middle East Fertility Society." Converging on the downtown convention center, reproductive endocrinologists, embryologists, andrologists, urologists, therapists, and psychologists attended courses in packed seminar rooms. But the real action was in the cavernous exhibition hall, where an array of twenty-first century conception technology was on display, rivaling anything unveiled by the military-industrial complex.

At the entrance to the hall, unavoidable to all who entered, was a booth maintained by Scandinavian Cryobank, a subsidiary of Cryos, one of the world's largest sperm banks. As one might expect, Scandinavian Cryobank specializes in Scandinavian sperm donors: specifically Danish donors enrolled in graduate programs at "major Scandinavian universities," men so mentall