The Pregnancy Project: Encounters with Reproductive Therapy

An author of children's textbooks, poems and a novel, Propp, who put off deciding to have a child until she was 39, joins the recent spate of memoirists who recount their struggles to have a child through reproductive technology (such as Linda Carbone and Ed Decker, author of A Little Pregnant). Her husband, Sam, had been rendered sterile during successful radiation treatments for prostate cancer. Before his treatments, however, he banked his semen. Propp subsequently endured three failed attempts at artificial insemination. The couple then turned to intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a new procedure whereby a single sperm is injected into an egg taken from the mother's body. Acknowledging that ICSI is accessible only to the affluent, Propp convincingly conveys the dashed hopes, despair and pure physical pain she experienced during the frequent injections and egg extractions. In order to stave off her depression, with which Sam appears to have had little sympathy, she joined a support group and did some volunteer counseling for other infertile women, many of whom had to wait nerve-racking months and years to have a biological child. After ICSI also failed, Propp finally became impregnated through an egg retrieval and an embryo transfer and later gave birth to her son, Zohar. Couples with fertility problems will take heart from the author's laborious success story.(Aug.)