Exploring the blurry frontier of fertility and its very human fallout.
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An astonishing real-life whodunnit and investigative exposé, Brave New Humans reveals the uncomfortable realities of assisted reproduction and its very human fallout.
Journalist Sarah Dingle was 27 when she learnt that her identity was a lie. Over dinner one night, her mother casually mentioned Sarah had been conceived using a sperm donor. The man who’d raised Sarah wasn’t her father; in fact, she had no idea who her father was. Or who she really was.
As the shock receded, Sarah put her professional skills to work and began to investigate her own existence. Thus began a ten-year journey to understand who she was – digging through hospital records, chasing leads and taking a DNA test – that finally led her to her biological origins. What she discovered along the way was shocking: hospital records routinely destroyed, trading of eggs and sperm, women dead, donors exploited, and hundreds of thousands of donor-conceived people globally who will never know who they are. But there’s one thing this industry hasn’t banked on: the children of the baby business taking on their makers.
In a profoundly personal way, Brave New Humans shines a light on the global fertility business today – a booming and largely unregulated industry that takes a startlingly lax approach to huge ethical concerns, not least our fundamental human need to know who we are, and where we come from.
Now an SBS documentary: Inconceivable: The Secret Business of Breeding Humans.
'I read Brave New Humans without pause. It made me ashamed of my first profession, medicine, which bangs on about ethics and patient centred care. Certainly hasn’t happened with donor conception in an industry which has made many of its founders very rich. Sarah has superbly balanced cold fury, grief and the professional focus of an experienced journalist.'
Details:
ISBN:
9781743796382
Format:
Paperback
Page Count:
352
Dimensions:
23.40cm x 15.30cm
Weight:
430g
Publisher:
Hardie Grant Books
Genre:
Biography & Memoir, Gift & Popular Culture, Health & Wellbeing