. and that of all of my classmates . the professor allowed the image to dominate the room for a long interlude before she began her lecture .
" we will spend the next few weeks talking about cleavage ," she said in a most professorial tone ." the other kind ."
where the other kind , the mitotic kind , of cleavage was concerned - as it so many things in life - lauren and i had been among the fortunate few . when we chose to have a baby , we were able to get pregnant the way heterosexual couples have gotten pregnant for all but a few decades of the time humans have inhabited this planet .
we had sex .
over the years we'd been aware of may friends who had not been so lucky on the other kind of cleavage front . getting haploids to do their things - a solitary sperm piercing the membrane of a healthy egg - and getting the resulting zygote to survive long enough to begin the process of the cleavage is not always as uncomlicated as boy meets girl .the lists couples we knew whose reproductive efforts were successful was a long one - probably longer than we suspected .some of our frustrated friends had ultimately chosen to go the invirto route .
we knew other couples who had eventually decided to adopt , either locally or aboard . one couple we knew had given up and come to terms with being childless .
whether it was due to age at marriage or environmental pollution or lifestyle or some esoteric factor tht physicians had not yet considered , it was apparent that modern reproduction had become thorny in ways that science struggleed to understand .
i was a clinician with a practice made up of a preponderance of women of childbearing age . i'd treated dozens of procreative frustration . i'd done my best to help many women struggle with the emotional fallout of infertility . but other than the eval i'd done four or five years before at the request of an agency .
" we will spend the next few weeks talking about cleavage ," she said in a most professorial tone ." the other kind ."
where the other kind , the mitotic kind , of cleavage was concerned - as it so many things in life - lauren and i had been among the fortunate few . when we chose to have a baby , we were able to get pregnant the way heterosexual couples have gotten pregnant for all but a few decades of the time humans have inhabited this planet .
we had sex .
over the years we'd been aware of may friends who had not been so lucky on the other kind of cleavage front . getting haploids to do their things - a solitary sperm piercing the membrane of a healthy egg - and getting the resulting zygote to survive long enough to begin the process of the cleavage is not always as uncomlicated as boy meets girl .the lists couples we knew whose reproductive efforts were successful was a long one - probably longer than we suspected .some of our frustrated friends had ultimately chosen to go the invirto route .
we knew other couples who had eventually decided to adopt , either locally or aboard . one couple we knew had given up and come to terms with being childless .
whether it was due to age at marriage or environmental pollution or lifestyle or some esoteric factor tht physicians had not yet considered , it was apparent that modern reproduction had become thorny in ways that science struggleed to understand .
i was a clinician with a practice made up of a preponderance of women of childbearing age . i'd treated dozens of procreative frustration . i'd done my best to help many women struggle with the emotional fallout of infertility . but other than the eval i'd done four or five years before at the request of an agency .
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