Exploring the 1990s Fertility Boom—and Scandals

Christina Cauterucci: “The Orange County Register broke the story of the fertility clinic’s abuses, and they won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage over the course of the year. The paper’s reporting is full of colorful details about the doctor at the center of it all—who owned five racehorses and drove a Ferrari with a cocky vanity plate—and the whistleblowers who exposed him.”

CC: “I interviewed Renee Ballou, whose eggs were stolen during a fertility procedure, about what it was like to learn in 1995 that another patient had given birth to her genetic child, born from her egg. The Chicago Tribune’s 1996 telling of Renee’s story gave me a starting point for our conversation.”

[NOTE: This article is no longer available on the Tribune’s site, but if you click save below you can read it in Pocket.]

CC: “Every story about reproductive health care is informed by cultural anxieties about women’s roles in public life. This excerpt from The Pursuit of Parenthood gives a smart analysis of how those anxieties showed up in the 1980s, when doctors and media outlets blamed feminism for a supposed epidemic of infertility in the United States.”

CC: “This 1991 Time magazine cover story is fun to read with the benefit of hindsight—one thing I love about history podcasts—because it’s remarkably optimistic about GIFT, the procedure invented by the doctor at the heart of our story. (Eventually, IVF would prove much more successful, and GIFT lost its shine.) I love the writer’s lyrical description of how the procedures worked: One benefit of GIFT, he writes, is that the embryo ‘drifts quietly into the uterus,’ rather than being ‘squirted, rather violently’ as in IVF. That didn’t end up mattering at all!”

CC: “When GIFT was first developed, people thought it would work better than IVF and other early fertility treatments because it seemed to mimic the ‘natural’ insemination process. Even the pope thought so: GIFT became the only Vatican-approved fertility procedure.”

CC: “When the scandal broke, ABC News’ Nightline producers realized that they had old footage of the doctor and one couple he’d treated in previous years. Here, the couple confronts the possibility that their extra eggs or embryos were given to other patients.”

CC: “This Orange Coast magazine piece on how a team of reporters uncovered the fertility clinic’s abuses should be adapted into a film, à la Spotlight. It’s got whistleblowers, leaked documents, and a race for the scoop of a lifetime.”

CC: “When I started reporting this story, I assumed that the scandal would have sparked a movement for fertility industry reform in the ‘90s. That’s not at all what happened. As this piece explains, the industry remains largely unregulated, in part because it’s hard to write legislation about embryos without staking a position on when life begins.”

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