UNTIL recently, all human reproduction resulted from sexual intercourse, and couples had to be prepared for the luck of the natural lottery. Now powerful new technologies are changing the reproductive landscape and challenging basic notions about procreation, parenthood, family, and children.

These developments excite both huzzas of approval and homilies of despair. On the one hand, they are eagerly sought by persons who suffer from infertility, who risk offspring with genetic disease, or who wish greater control over the timing of children. But others decry their use as unnatural interventions into reproduction, and fear their effect on children, families, women, and society.

Indeed, there is something profoundly frightening about technological control over the beginning of human life. Anxiety over these techniques abounds, even as a growing number of persons seek them out. We are both fascinated and repelled by surrogate motherhood, in utero fetal surgery, prenatal genetic manipulation, the latest frozen embryo case, and the other technologies now on the menu of reproductive choice. They present a series of dilemmas. Individuals must decide whether to use novel means to achieve their reproductive goals despite the ethical and social uncertainties involved. If so, they must also learn to use them in responsible, constructive ways that minimize harmful effects on participants and offspring. In some cases, they will have to resist technologies that partners, physicians, or governments try to foist on them.

At the same time, society must decide whether to permit these techniques to be developed and used. It must identify the circumstances in which use should be restricted or regulated, and devise a framework for respecting individual desires for access while maintaining ethical values, protecting offspring and participants, and preventing injustice and oppression in their use. This is no small task. The deepest needs of individuals must be reconciled with community values in a setting where the rules are still unwritten and subject to change.

The goal of this book is to show the importance of procreative lib-

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