Women will go to extraordinary lengths to have babies. A friend procured copper wire and got her husband to wind it around the base of their bed in the belief that it would help her to conceive. She is now the mother of three.
An acquaintance told me that her brother met an flight attendant on a flight, who tricked him into a love affair, and quietly disappeared once she had fallen pregnant. She reappeared years later, stricken with terminal cancer, revealing her secret and begging the father to raise his child. He and his now-wife agreed to do so.
I myself resorted to saying nine-day novenas to St Gerard, the patron saint of mothers and children, after a sage warning from my doctor that I had a 50 per cent chance of carrying a baby to term. His prognosis was spot on: my six pregnancies produced three babies.
Children are, as Kalil Gibran says, 'the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself': there is no suitable description for the primal urge so many of us feel to procreate, and no accounting for the strength of an instinct which cascades unchecked through the veins and settles in the deep well of the heart.
It's an instinct that makes a cruel mockery of the estimated 15 per cent of Australian couples who cannot have children. Infertility is an absence which no-one but the sufferer notices, a hole that can be filled only by a living, breathing baby. 'For those of us who remain childless, infertility is a lifelong disability,' says Sandra who, after 12 years of treatment, has accepted that she will never be a mum.
But not all infertile people are doomed to childlessness: millions of people around the world have benefited from in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a procedure so radical, so socially transformative, that its co-creator has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.
When British doctors Robert Edwards (pictured) and Patrick Steptoe created their first 'test-tube' embryo in late 1977, they were bringing hope not just to John and Lesley Brown — parents of the resulting baby, Louise Joy Brown — but to millions of men and women unable to conceive naturally. Today, IVF is used in around three per cent