Some Reflections on Medically Assisted Reproduction1

Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra—

son giunto, lasso, ed al bianchir de colli,

quando si perde lo color ne l'erba:

e 'l mio desio però non cangia il verde.2

In the depths of prostration—she can no longer sleep without waking up from a recurrent nightmare of suffocation—in the depths of a state of anxiety that is driving her nearly to suicide, Rachel seeks the help of an analyst after a series of failed attempts to become pregnant. She has already consulted four specialists, the last of whom urges her to let him attempt a second in vitro insemination. Rachel has no steady companion, and when she speaks of possible fathers for the baby she so desperately wants, she lauds only their physical endowments. These are not men you can count on, but then again none of them really counts in this quest she's on. The person she does trust is the medical specialist.

Her state of prostration is striking, and with it, a more insistent demand, a more insistent longing to experience motherhood, what she refers to as the miracle of birth. She visits one physician after another with the sense of approaching some final deadline. It takes five months of regular meetings for the taut wire of dreams that abruptly shatter her sleep to reveal the circumstances surrounding her own birth: only recently has she found out that she is not the biological daughter of the father who has raised her, but rather the sole fruit of a mother's transgression in a marriage that brought life to five children. It will be the course of analysis that impels her to discover that the family doctor, the very same doctor who helped her mother bring her into the world, is her biological father.

Let us merely point out here that Rachel, in her wish to be a mother, questions maternal desire, her mother's desire as a woman and as a mother, just as she questions in the doctor the desire of a man and a father. At the same time she questions the truth of which her coming into existence is the fru