"The wild new world of reproduction"

There is, for example, the story of Doug Okun and Eric Ethington, two gay men determined to conceive and raise a child. They visit a swank surrogacy agency, compile a marketing profile of themselves and eventually discover Ann Nelson, a mother of four from West Virginia, who agrees to carry their child. Then they start searching for another woman to provide the eggs, reasoning, as Mundy tells us, that "of course she would have to be fabulous, your basic Ivy League supermodel."

While the two men are dashing across the country to attend their daughters' birth, Nelson starts hemorrhaging. Doctors race to stop the bleeding and ultimately perform an emergency hysterectomy to save her life. An unfortunate accident? Perhaps. But Nelson, we learn, was overweight. She had delivered her own children by Caesarean section and was at increased risk for uterine rupture. Yet the doctors and prospective fathers still agreed to transfer four embryos to her, creating a predictably dangerous pregnancy....

For this reader, the most poignant stories of Everything Conceivable concerned the peripheral players: David Nelson, Ann's husband, who stood photographing Okun and Ethington's newborn daughters while his wife lay nearly dying from their birth...