American Experience

Other Potential Problems With IVF

Arthur Caplan:The technology quickly fell into a corporate ethos. It became a business. It became something that was heavily marketed. It became something that was advertised, even for a time, with what I would describe as false advertising. People would say, “We’ll get you a baby,” but they wouldn’t say what their success rate was, or they wouldn’t admit that they had a lot of failures. So the critics were worried about government control, but actually it was corporate control that came to create problems for reproductive technology.

A lot of the critics had worried about this idea of unnaturalness. Well, that faded immediately. Nobody has ever come up to me and said, you know, “I’m stigmatized. I’m a test tube baby.” I mean, no one talks that way… Nobody cares about this. We don’t actually have any notion of stigma that associates with being made this way, any more than if I said, “You know, I was born with a forceps-assisted delivery.” Nobody cares. And that’s the attitude about test tube baby technology. People worried that you’d be seen as a freak or some kind of monster, just by being made that way. That never happened at all. Our culture is so friendly to technology that nobody really cared if you started off in a dish or in a bedroom or wherever you started.