Women will go to extraordinary lengths to have babies. A friend procured copper wire and got her husband to wind it around the base of their bed in the belief that it would help her to conceive. She is now the mother of three.
An acquaintance told me that her brother met an flight attendant on a flight, who tricked him into a love affair, and quietly disappeared once she had fallen pregnant. She reappeared years later, stricken with terminal cancer, revealing her secret and begging the father to raise his child. He and his now-wife agreed to do so.
I myself resorted to saying nine-day novenas to St Gerard, the patron saint of mothers and children, after a sage warning from my doctor that I had a 50 per cent chance of carrying a baby to term. His prognosis was spot on: my six pregnancies produced three babies.
Children are, as Kalil Gibran says, 'the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself': there is no suitable description for the primal urge so many of us feel to procreate, and no accounting for the strength of an instinct which cascades unchecked through the veins and settles in the deep well of the heart.
It's an instinct that makes a cruel mockery of the estimated 15 per cent of Australian couples who cannot have children. Infertility is an absence which no-one but the sufferer notices, a hole that can be filled only by a living, breathing baby. 'For those of us who remain childless, infertility is a lifelong disability,' says Sandra who, after 12 years of treatment, has accepted that she will never be a mum.
But not all infertile people are doomed to childlessness: millions of people around the world have benefited from in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a procedure so radical, so socially transformative, that its co-creator has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.
When British doctors Robert Edwards (pictured) and Patrick Steptoe created their first 'test-tube' embryo in late 1977, they were bringing hope not just to John and Lesley Brown — parents of the resulting baby, Louise Joy Brown — but to millions of men and women unable to conceive naturally. Today, IVF is used in around three per cent of all births in Australia, a figure comparable to that in other developed countries.
With news of the award, glasses are no doubt being raised by parents whose children would not exist but for the tenacity displayed by the 'maverick' doctors in the face of scientific and social dissent (Steptoe, who died in 1988, is not named as a joint winner of the award since the Nobel committee does not confer posthumous recognition).
But there are still those who rail against the conception of babies in laboratories rather than in the bedroom. To be sure, IVF, though groundbreaking, has also been the progenitor of ethically questionable outcomes: the destruction of redundant embryos, the creation of designer babies, the rise of 'rent-a-womb' tourism in countries like India, where poor women are paid to incubate embryos for wealthy foreigners.
The Vatican's top bioethics official, Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula says that, while Edwards 'began a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction', without him there wouldn't be a thriving market in donor eggs nor freezers packed with doomed embryos.
'Edwards built a house but opened the wrong door,' he said, suggesting that the professor had not succeeded in solving the underlying causes of infertility.
Certainly, our society is prone to brushing aside the inconvenient consequences that sometimes stem from its decisions. But the beneficiaries of Edwards' intellectual largesse — people practised in deep reflection — will have applied more consideration than most to the consequences of their actions.
'We were in much grief about the fact that we couldn't conceive on our own, and we considered the use of IVF very carefully,' says my friend, Anne*, the mother of twins.
'Recently we met a beautiful couple who were given an embryo, which would have been thrown away or used in medical research. Their little girl was six years old ... we couldn't bear the thought of her going without life. So we're now thinking about donating our embryos to couples who cannot conceive on their own, genetically.
'We have been given the opportunity to have a family through IVF, and now we feel we may be asked to think about passing this possibility on to other couples.'
In a perfect world, heart-rending decisions such as this wouldn't need to be taken. IVF wouldn't cause collateral damage, nor would it be put to ill-use. But in a perfect world, there would be no such thing as infertility.
In seeking to fill a mother's empty womb and empty arms, Edwards developed a solution, and in so doing confirmed what all innovators know: that progress doesn't occur in a neat and orderly vacuum, and nor should it be halted for fear of what it might produce.
While the Edwardses of this world are busy making their medical, legal and social breakthroughs, the rest of us might like to make our own contribution by preparing a world that is capable of balancing the benefits of modernity with a well-developed, universal probity.
*Not her real name
Catherine Marshall is a journalist working for Jesuit Communications.