Starring the larger-than-life Lord Robert Winston - who now works in show-business part-time - and Ian "Mr Mystery" Craft - the man whose magic laparoscope can conjure up a real live baby out of a woman old enough to be your grandmother! - and a host of engaging minor progenitors, the world of reproductive medicine has often seemed quite as much a branch of the entertainment industry as a field of scientific inquiry. Why should this be? While one appreciates that a job making babies might be especially attractive to men, since they cannot give birth, and intensely so to any man prone to delusions of divinity, it is still far from clear why the profession should have attracted, over the years, men who so enjoy performing on the public stage that several of its members have become household names.
How many of us can name even one maverick oncologist, living or dead? One "I'm mad, me" radiologist? Or a single vascular surgeon who - when he's not saving lives - is just crazy, like Mr Craft, about swank cars and art collecting? And yet, step forward Steptoe and Edwards, Winston and Craft, and more recently, Mr Mohamed Taranassi, one of the richest doctors in the UK, who pops up regularly to talk about the potential of embryo-screening and egg-freezing. Given the willingness of some fertility experts to advertise procedures that are still massively unpredictable or pretty much at the drawing-board stage, or even complete fantasies, we should probably include among the celebrity life-givers, the names of two self-styled clone-artists, Italy's Severino Antinori and the American Panos Zavos.
Whatever it is that natural performers see in the study of human reproduction, it appears that the tradition continues: fertility talent-spotters think they may have a very promising new act in Mr Bill Ledger, whose terrifying prognostication, "Britain's fertility timebomb", this week enlivened the pages of several newapers, including this one. The choice of words was such as to make one wonder if the professor's more sober, academic ruminations might not have been lost in translation to the public arena. But no, at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference - an event that is fast becoming a media fixture to compare, if not with Wimbledon, at least with the Lib Dem's annual gathering - Ledger really did predict a "fertility timebomb", that will force unnumbered couples to endure costly IVF treatment at the hands of specialists such as himself. Cripes! Or alternatively, if you think this would be a very effective way of controlling the population, leading, in the long term to less crowded railways and the dismissal of John Prescott, the housebuilder's friend: excellent!
When is the infertility timebomb likely to detonate? There would be an awfully big conflagration if it went off at the same time as the obesity timebomb, the skin-cancer timebomb and the binge-drinking timebomb. Not to mention the death timebomb, which, experts predict, will claim all of us, at some point. In fact it is a wonder, with so much explosive matériel primed to go off at any time, that Heather Mills-McCartney has not yet got involved. Can nothing be done to make this fertility timebomb safe? Perhaps there are modest grounds for hope. For as the professor says, the probability of a rise from one in seven to one in three couples having fertility problems depends "on what the population does".
Of the prime causes for alarm cited by the professor - late childbirth, obesity, sexually transmitted diseases, declining male fertility - the advance of both obesity and of sexual disease could be checked, even reversed. An exponential deline in male fertility seems to be speculative. The tendency for women to delay pregnancy is likely to be substantially corrected, once they appreciate, as they did not before, the risks of procrastination. Indeed, if the creepy fascination with proceedings at this specialist conference (about a non-fatal health problem which still, mercifully, does not afflict a good six-sevenths of the population) has any redeeming feature, it is that few young women are likely to choose late motherhood, supposing they have a choice, after reading articles like this one, from the Times, "Women in their 40s put health at risk by getting pregnant".
Professor Michael de Swiet, another promising artiste, who hails from Queen Charlotte's hospital, is quoted as saying, "What you have to remember is that some of these women who become pregnant with IVF techniques are fundamentally unwell - they are not good breeders and they are at high risk of both both morbidity and mortality." Unlike those lucky breeders denoted "superbreeders" by researchers at Hadassah University Hospital, Jerusalem, who just can't stop reproducing.
Outside gay circles, breeders is not word you hear often nowadays. But at the fertility conference they say it all the time. Is it fanciful to think that this kind of vocabulary could to some extent account for the popularity, in the media, of the Copenhagen fertility conference? Licensed by their unimpeachable desire to support the work of the world's leading fertility experts, those who bring us reports from the frontiers of this specialism not only have a solemn duty to produce copy so thickly strewn with allusions to sperm and fertilisation, regular sex and reproductive tracts that it resembles advice to couples from the local obs and gynae unit, they are free, for once, to sermonise would-be mothers - with their doomed tubes and tragically unreliable reproductive machinery - on the folly of defying nature.
What must make this exercise particularly gratifying is the willingness of doctors in the downstairs department - the male ones, at least - to speak over the heads of fellow clinicians to a wider audience, which knows to sit up and pay attention to words such as "timebomb". Was there anyone at the conference, who on hearing the word "superbreeder" did not anticipate its appearance in many of the following day's papers, complete with an allusion to, or picture of Mrs Blair? Something which became a certainty after Professor Bill Ledger, of timebomb fame, said, "Cherie Blair is the lucky exception that proves the rule." But I suppose it did teach us something. She is superwoman, after all.
Happily married humanists
Fascinating as it was, an article in G2 about humanists, by the deputy editor of New Humanist magazine, Padraig Reidy, shed little light on British humanists' determination to have their own humanist weddings, the first of which took place in Edinburgh last weekend. Scottish officials had been persuaded that not letting humanists have their own weddings could put them in breach of the Human Rights Act. The bride explained that she and her husband "wanted to be able to express our thoughts and feelings for each other freely". But they could have done that anyway. Is it so difficult to wait until you are out of the register office to exchange some home-made vows and a selection of inspiring hymeneal ditties - To His Coy Mistress, for instance, or some lines from The Hollow Men?
Perhaps it is irritating that churches, with all their curious beliefs, should be privileged in this respect; but unlike humanists, churches hold marriage to be a sacrament, and have a fairly well-established ritual to go with it. Given the wide availability of reasonably priced, religion free marriage rites, the humanists' insistence that they, too, be allowed to offer the full works, with a proper certificate and a humanist official doing the non-priestly honours, looks more like a desire to acquire some of the privileges of an established faith than an advance for rational thought. At any rate, if humanists are allowed their own made-up wedding, there seems no reason why members of every other interest group, from nudists to anti-vivisectionists, should not, sooner or later, be allowed to devise their own legally recognised ceremonies, which are all too likely to involve lengthy recitations, improvisation, and, in the worst cases, some Isadora-inspired fairy dancing.
Whatever the shortcomings of the official civil ceremony, it has the familiarity essential to any decent ritual, and is well-phrased, dignified, and mercifully short. According to Reidy, the humanist credo is: "What you would avoid suffering yourself, seek not to impose on others." They should have applied it to weddings.
