Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women, and the World
By Liza Mundy
Allen Lane £20, 406 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

How should Beth Parab, an Episcopal minister preparing to baptise the Ramirez test-tube triplets (Preston, Edward and Hunter), respond to their mother Laura’s request to incorporate egg donor Kendra Vanderipe into the ceremony? This dilemma kicks off Everything Conceivable and exemplifies Liza Mundy’s approach.

This book overflows with long anecdotes about folksy Americans with wonderful names from diverse ethnic, religious and sexual backgrounds, who share a desperate desire to overcome the barriers of biology and have children. Mundy, a Washington Post journalist, spent two years criss-crossing the US to interview parents, would-be -parents and fertility specialists. Although most patients are hetero-sexual couples suffering from infertility, many others – gay and lesbian couples and determinedly single parents – are fertile but unwilling to conceive naturally.

Many of the stories are moving, even heartbreaking – but they go on too long, with interminable quotes that should have been edited drastically. Everyone knows that younger Americans spatter their conversation with “like”, but I will not be the only reader irritated by the proliferation of the word in this book. Typical is Eric Ethington, a gay Californian talking about a potential egg donor: “And as I thought about it, it’s like: I really like her.” One quote from Ethington contains 10 superfluous likes in a single paragraph.

But I do not want to be too mean about Mundy. Beneath her sentimental self-indulgence lies a much-needed investigation into assisted reproductive technology. ART is frequently in the news but seldom subjected to deep journalistic analysis.

In the US, ART is under-regulated and under-researched, as a direct consequence of the hold that anti-abortion groups and Christian fundamentalists have on politics. President George W. Bush’s severe restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, the current focus of political debate in Washington, are symptomatic of a long-standing reluctance by the US government to fund any research involving human embryos. Because positions are so polarised, it is almost impossible to get legislation involving human embryos through Congress. Mundy holds up Europe’s fertility regulators, particularly the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, as role models for the US.

For her, the symbol of American excess is the much higher proportion of dangerous multiple births than in European IVF clinics: “In some sense, multiple births in the US are the result of a perfect storm of contributing factors: pro-life opposition to embryo research; the demand for total reproductive liberty on the part of infertility patients’ advocacy groups; and, not least, doctors who benefit from transferring responsibility for decision-making to patients.”

Everything Conceivable offers little new about assisted reproduction but it does illuminate domestic life and politics in contemporary America. Cut to half its present length it would be a good read.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor.