Not all that glitters is gold.

I too want to begin with the example of the gold museum. Gold did not land in that museum from the sky. It came at great cost in human life and liberty. That is what is still left hidden in the dark, and in that sense the analogy works perhaps far better than was intended. Embryo diagnosis also has costs in life and in liberty - that of the women on whose bodies these experiments are done. While the proven deaths to date from IVF-related treatments are quite small, the long-term risks are not yet in. And the costs of pain, illness, and physical and emotional suffering from these procedures go largely unremarked in Andrea Bonnicksen's discussion, collapsed into "financial loss and emotional strain" for the "couple." IVF and embryo retrieval procedures do not take place on a couple's body - it is a woman on the table, a woman who bears the costs of this treatment. The new procreative technologies began with enormous fanfare, welcoming Louise Brown into the world, the first "test tube baby." What the technology has come to accomplish in just the fourteen years since her birth is indeed extraordinary. Originally, all they were doing (all!) was bypassing blocked fallopian tubes, letting sperm and egg join in a petri dish before continuing growth, in utero that is, in a woman, a mother. And now? The fastest growing use of this technology is for male infertility: most recently, with microinjection of a few living sperm, an otherwise infertile man can fertilize an egg. Fertilized eggs can now be frozen and stored indefinitely, and technologies are being developed to allow the freezing of unfertilized eggs. Ovaries can be stimulated to produce not the one or maybe two eggs of a normal cycle, but a dozen or even more. The plethora of eggs the drugs have created has spawned its own technology: pregnancy reduction, selectively aborting some embryos in a multiple pregnancy, turning potential quintuplets into more manageable twins. The embryos themselves, while outside of the body, can now be examined, with the largest potential growth area for the technology being, as Bonnicksen points out, preimplantation diagnosis. Sex, chromosomal anomalies, and genetic disorders can be learned from embryo biopsy before the embryo is put back into the woman. Embryo diagnosis and embryo splitting can mean ordering specific embryos for growth, including the genetic twins of already born people, introducing a new level of quality control into procreation, and - combined with commercial surrogacy - making baby farms come to seem a real possibility. In a new twist that seems to fascinate the reproductive technologists themselves, with the use of hormones postmenopausal women can carry donated embryos. Is all this science at its best? - New HOPE FOR THE CHILDLESS - or science at its worst? - SCIENTIST MAKES OLD WOMAN PREGNANT WITH ALIENS. Somewhere between the vision of Scientific American and that of the National Enquirer, women are groping their way through. If Louise Brown is the Eve of this story, there is also a Lillith - a first creation, a false start discarded by her creators. The first pregnancy from IVF produced an embryo with three sets of chromosomes, an anomaly incompatible with life. Leslie Brown, Louise's mother, had no idea that hers was the first baby that Steptoe and Edward's technology had produced. Nor did she know of the miscarriage that preceded this success. Another woman's false hopes, the deception by inference of Leslie Brown - this is a technology built on the blood, losses, and hopes of women. The Costs of IVF By now the costs of IVF and related technologies to infertile women themselves have started to show up. The first risks to consider are the immediate physical ones of the treatment. While the focus is on the petri dish or test tube and its contents, it is the woman's body that lies on the table. These are invasive treatments, involving powerful drugs and surgery, and deaths do occur. …