I really struggled with this book despite many attempts to dive into it. The topic of fertility is an important one. Its history is often overlooked. Pairing the excellent research on fertility treatment and its origins with personal narrative is a great idea but the tone and voice were inaccessible to me. Perhaps it was where I was in my own journey while trying to read this clearly smartly put together, well crafted book.

Releasing today, Jenni Quilter’s immersive and thought provoking, Hatching’s memoir explores Quilter’s personal and often difficult experiences with modern reproductive technologies, fertility, motherhood, and the female body. Through the memoir, Quilter explores the choices we have as a humanity when it comes to our reproductive health, desires, and decisions.

Growing up in a culture that holds contradictory values on a woman’s body, Quilter’s exploration of this issue, as she undergoes medical procedures and traces the historical trajectories and people who began to examine reproductive technologies, blurs the lines between public and private. As she deals with her sentiments towards motherhood itself, the prospect of infertility and making the phone call across the world to her own mother was memorable. There is a bond that mother-child have when it comes to carrying the generation forward and the expectation of a parent to become a grandparent.
The social, psychological, and emotional pressures that would-be mothers/parents and women who face the prospect of infertility is at the heart of this powerful book. Most interesting to me was when Quilter mentions that women who were infertile were often accused of witchcraft or portrayed as witches/sites of evil who consumed children in fantasy narratives such as Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel. If the child was stillborn, deformed, or had a miscarriage, then too, evil women and foul spirits were held responsible.

As our society continues to grapple with the ethical, social, and moral implications of reproductive technologies, Quilter’s memoir engages with her personal experience on the IVF journey with her parents half way across the world. She begins with the discussion of freezing her eggs, which in itself is an expensive procedure.

Undoubtedly, Hatching is a book that is a must-read as it explores female agency, and how women deal with the prospect of motherhood, and how their bodies becomes sites of political debates, technological experiments, and human life. It is raw. It is powerful. It is the most awaited discussion that we need to have no matter what one’s values on this sensitive topic! It is ultimately about how we make choices and how complex and nuanced we are as reproductive beings.

This is a deeply thoughtful exploration of how we do or don't get pregnant and the role of science in getting there. It is a topic the author is personally invested in, as it begins with her struggles with infertility and her story provides a human framework, but she is not only recording and processing her own story. "The "experiments" in the book's subtitle is an accurate match for the book's tone. Quilter discusses the experiments that led to modern assisted reproduction, but she's also interested in how we have experimented with how to talk about the process. I was fascinated for instance with a discussion of how sonograms have changed how we talk about pregnant bodies, including our own. The book provides a deep historical context for the development of IVF, pointing out throughout whose narratives and experiences are privileged and whose voices are amplified. I felt engaged with Quilter's personal story, but I also was fascinated by the history and science. This feels like a very timely book that offers new ways to think about fertility, infertility, and the process of becoming a parent.

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for the free digital ARC I received in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.

I enjoyed the way this book braids together personal experience, medical history and a close look at the medical industrial complex. A riveting personal and collective history,

Quilter has done exhaustive research into the history of women’s health and fertility. Woven into this history is her personal story of undergoing IVF. I was more interested in Quilter’s personal story, but other readers may find the history of women’s health and fertility fascinating.