Taking Baby Steps How Patients and Fertility Clinics Collaborate in Conception [Hardcover]

InTaking Baby Steps, Jody Lyneé Madeira takes readers inside the infertility experience, from dealing with infertility-related emotions to forming treatment relationships with medical professionals and confronting difficult medical decisions. Based on hundreds of interviews, this book investigates how women, men, and medical professionals negotiate infertility’s rocky terrain to create life and build families—a journey across personal, medical, legal, and ethical minefields that can test mental and physical health, friendships and marriages, spirituality, and financial security.

Jody Lyneé Madeirais Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University–Bloomington, and the author ofKilling McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure.

"Jody Lyneé Madeira’s interviews capture the voices of fertility patients as they struggle with decisions about whether to keep trying after repeated failures, how many embryos to implant at a time, and whether to experiment with potentially risky procedures. This volume will provide guidance (and perhaps some solace) for those undergoing fertility treatment and their friends and relatives. It also adds new depth to our understanding of the concept of 'informed consent' and of the human capacity for decision-making in the face of often heartbreaking challenges." 
 —June Carbone, Robina Chair in Law, Science, and Technology, University of Minnesota

"Taking Baby Steps turns the experience of infertility inside out, portraying the rigors and uncertainties of 'fertility math' from the perspective of those who use technology to have children and the doctors who treat them. Madeira challenges the stereotype of the 'desperate infertile woman,' a contemporary offshoot of older notions of women as hysterical, and replaces it with a carefully consideredl)