Woman: An Intimate Geography Read Online Free PDF Page A

the oily membrane that surrounds most of the abdominal viscera and finally perforates the ovary. Bustillo does the entire extraction procedure by watching the ultrasound screen, where the image of the ovary looms in black and white, made visible by bouncing high-frequency sound waves. Coming in on the top lefthand side of the screen is the needle. The ovary looks like a giant beehive honeycombed with dark bloated egg pockets, or follicles, each measuring two millimeters across. These are all the follicles that were matured by Derochea's diligent nocturnal injections. The sonogram screen is full of them. Manipulating the needle-headed probe with her eyes fixed on the sonogram, Bustillo punctures every dark honeycomb and sucks all the fluid out of the follicle. The fluid travels down the tube of the probe and into a catchment beaker. You can't see the egg suspended in that fluid, but it's there. Immediately after the fluid has been extracted from the follicle, the pocket collapses in on itself and disappears from the screen. A few moments later it slightly distends again, this time with blood.
Prick! Prick! Prick! Bustillo pierces and vacuums out every follicle so quickly that the honeycomb seems alive with accordion motion: pockets fall in, reengorge with blood. Prick! Prick! Prick! It hurts vicariously to watch; I want to cross my legs in discomfort except that I'm standing up. One of the surgical assistants tells me that sometimes the women who have this procedure done demand that it be performed without anesthesia. They regret their choice. At some point they start screaming.
When the left ovary is picked clean of ripe eggs, Bustillo moves the probe over to the other vaginal fornix and repeats the maneuver on the right ovary. The entire bilateral pricking and sucking takes ten minutes or so. "Okay, that's it," Bustillo says as she withdraws the probe. A stream of blood flows from Derochea's vagina like a fire set by a departing army. The nurses clean her up and start calling her name and shaking her arm to wake her. Beth! Beth! You're done, we're done, we've plucked you clean. Your genes are now floating in the communal pool in which another woman soon will immerse herself, seeking baptism with baby.

     

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Back in the lab, Carol-Ann Cook, an embryologist, separates and counts the day's plunder: twenty-nine eggs, the same number harvested from Beth Derochea twice before. This woman's vineyards are fruitful! Cook prepares the eggs, these grapes of Beth, for fertilization with the sperm of another woman's husband, a woman who lacks viable eggs of her own.
The use of donor eggs for in vitro fertilization is one of the few promising things that have happened to the technique since its introduction in the 1970s. Most women who attempt IVF are nearing the end of their patience and fecundity. They are in their late thirties, early forties. For reasons that remain entirely opaque, the eggs of an "older" woman and it annoys me to use that term for anybody under eighty, let alone my peers have lost some of their plasticity and robustness. They don't ripen as readily, they don't fertilize as well, and once fertilized, they don't implant in the womb as firmly as the eggs of a younger woman do. Older women usually start by trying IVF with their own eggs. They are partial to their particular genomes, their molecular ancestry, and why not? There's little difference between a baby and a book, and it's usually best to write about what you know. So they go through what Beth Derochea went through, weeks of preparatory hormonal injections. At the other end, though, they give forth not dozens of eggs but perhaps three or four, and some of those may be barely breathing. The fertility gods do their best. They join the healthiest-looking eggs and a partner's sperm in a petri dish to form embryos. After two days or so, they deliver the embryos back to the woman by squirting the clusters of cells, afloat in liquid, through a thin tube