And the results are hardly promising either. Of all those who opt for MAC, an average of only 36% achieve conception with 90% of those (less than one third overall) making it to live birth. These figures do not indicate how many attempts (at $8000 a go) it takes to achieve those artificial conceptions. Fertility clinics are understandably not very forthcoming with their own rates of failure.
   As to the customers of MAC, I consider they have been poorly advised and counselled as to the best approach for their own needs. Only two generations ago, they would have been briefly consoled by their family and told to “get on with it”, that “life had other plans for them”. And many did, without regrets of motherhood lost. Some of these women became very special “aunts” in their families and in their community, of equal respect and capacity to the other mothers able to bear their own children.
   Science has created many great things for modern society, things which have cheaply and effectively served the great majority of people, and things which have assisted nature in wonderful new ways. But in the matter of artificial conceptions, I do not believe that wisdom is being employed or sufficient discrimination is being exercised. Consider for one moment, if all the money spent on such pursuits had been redirected into finding natural ways of preventing infertility, into creating healthier pregnancies, and into assuring less interventionist births, how much greater the gains would have been for motherhood, society and humanity.
   As to the actual success rate of MAC, these statistics speak for themselves(9). Of all the couples who seek medical help with their conception difficulties:
•  20% are sent away as ineligible, untreatable, or opt not to enter a program for a variety of reasons;
•  40% enter medical assisted fertility programs and waste their time and money. All efforts fail to result in a pregnancy;
•  33% enter medical assisted fertility programs and eventually attain successful live births;
•  5% have a spontaneous “cure”, conceiving within 12 months without any medical assistance;
•  2.5% remain infertile despite all attempts and options, even outside of medically assisted fertility programs.
   For those who do actually enter a program, the so-called solution always involves months, and sometimes years, of trial and error attempts, myriad invasive medical tests and operations, the use of powerful drugs on the reproductive organs, an increase in infertility anxiety, the trauma of failed implantations, enormous cost – and all for just a 1 in 3 chance of success.
 

Should Medically Assisted Conception succeed, the mother then has a foetus (or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6) which is so precious that it is destined to serve out its time in the womb under the closest possible medical scrutiny, arriving at a birthing experience (most probably by caesarean section) under similar controlled conditions.
   Whereas the atom bomb heralded the future of the ultimate weapons for human destruction, without meaning to be alarmist or suggest it may destroy the human race, MAC signposts the ultimate direction in controlling human creation. The issues raised by MAC and all its brother sciences like genetic screening and selection, genetic engineering, genetic modification of crops and animals, in-utero surgery, are possibly the greatest ethical minefield that mankind has ever faced. I don’t dismiss such technologies as useless or dangerous per se, but rather consider some of their present applications in the field of conception, pregnancy and childbirth as misguided, unnecessary and unhelpful to the cause of advancing a more healthy human race.
   This very day as I write, was the first world release of the completed Human Genome Project, a vast enterprise of mapping the 3 billion DNA sequences which comprise our human physiology. Well done guys, that’s a great achievement to be sure. But now – what are you going to do with that – that is the question. This new development in medical science is sure to have mammoth repercussions on conception, pregnancy and birthing procedures. In 5, 20, 50, 200 years, what methods will humans be employing to reproduce? Will it be illegal to have sex for conception if you carry certain “undesirable” genetic flaws? Will women’s wombs be considered solely as incubators for the creations of a laboratory or, equally possible, will babies be conceived, gestated and born from inside surrogate, synthetic wombs in the laboratory to “save” us all this pain and bother of pregnancy? How much more of our life will be artificial due to the so-called advances of science?
   Whilst I could have left this whole issue right out of the book I believe these topics should be openly debated, all opinions canvassed, and all the options examined, particularly by those whom these trends most affect – existing and potential mothers – i.e. 50% of the world. Here’s a partial list of some of the issues in this Pandora’s box.
•  Are we playing God? Does man have the right to override the mechanisms of natural selection?
•  Why does nature select certain people as not fit for reproduction?
•  Can society justify the financial cost of