1. New scenarios – new dilemmas

2To explore these dilemmas, I will discuss a set of novels and films that deal with new scenarios that have emerged in the wake of ART. I have chosen two films, The Kids Are All Right (2010) by American director Lisa Cholodenko and Venuto al mondo [Brought into the world] (2012) by Italian director Sergio Castellitto, the documentary film Google Baby (2009) by Israeli director Zippi Brand Frank, and three novels: Carissimi [Dearest] (2019) by Italian writer Letizia Muratori, Non mi vendere, mamma! [Do not sell me, mom!] (2016) by Italian writer Barbara Alberti, Katherine Carlyle (2015) by British novelist Rupert Thomson. Before turning to these films and novels I will provide a brief summary of the history of assisted reproductive technology.

3For many, ART began with Louise Brown, a baby who was born in England in 1978, thanks to a revolutionary technique invented by P.C. Steptoe and R.G. Edwards: in vitro fertilization (IVF). The embryo from which Louise developed was the first to have been created in a lab. Ms Brown’s oocyte, extracted from the woman’s body, was put together with Mr Brown’s sperm in a Petri dish. Two and a half days later, the newly formed embryo was implanted into the woman’s uterus. A pregnancy followed, with Louise delivered just over thirty-eight weeks later. IVF quickly became popular, and bypassed some frequent causes of female sterility: fallopian tube blockage, malfunctioning of the ovaries, difficulties caused by the advanced age of the intended mother. In IVF, ovaries are stimulated via hormonal treatment and encouraged to produce multiple eggs in a single cycle. The eggs (or rather the follicles in which they are contained) are then collected from the ovary via a chirurgical intervention and put together with spermatozoa. If the semen fertilizes the egg, the latter (now called embryo or pre-embryo) is implanted into the womb. Doctors, in agreement with the patient, may decide to implant more than one embryo to increase the possibility of success.

10Advances in ART have resulted in the birth of millions of children who would otherwise not have been born. But they have also triggered numerous controversies. Surrogacy, in particular, inspired heated debates, but disagreement is by no means confined to this particular process. Almost every aspect of ART creates new dilemmas, just as it creates new babies. The practice of implanting several embryos in the uterus of one woman, for instance, has dramatically enhanced the success rates of IVF. But is it ethical to induce multiple pregnancies, given the higher risks for women and foetuses? Studies have demonstrated exceptional levels of support and love among gay parents, and suggest that gay households, in particular, hold the power to educate a new generation of children to positive models of post-patriarchal masculinity and femininity. But is the desire to father genetically related children a good enough reason to recur to the controversial, and often exploitative, practice of surrogacy? Would it not be preferable to campaign globally, internationally, to make the practice of adoption more efficient, and more easily available to gay parents?

11Is donor anonymity desirable? Have the offspring a right to know how they came into the world? Or should their parents be allowed to fashion their own story? In Fare figli. Storia della genitorialità dagli antichi miti all’utero artificiale, Carlo Flamigni and Carlo Bulletti – two of Italy’s leading experts in the physiopathology of reproduction – note, with apparent satisfaction, that many couples choose to interrupt any contact with the birth clinic as soon as the much-desired baby is born. Everyone has played their part – male donors, female donors, gestational carriers – and it is only appropriate, according to the two authors, that everybody should now step back and let the social parents enjoy their new life with the child. Bulletti and Flamigni write:

• 17  Carlo Bulletti and Carlo Flamigni, Fare figli. Storia della genitorialità dagli antichi miti all’u (...)

Allo stesso modo, pensiamo che il problema del segreto sia un falso problema: non è difficile spiegare a un adolescente che è importante solo colui che ha preso la decisione di farlo nascere (e se n’è assunto la responsabilità) e conta invece meno di zero chi ha fornito il programma genetico, oltretutto insignificante per quanto riguarda la sua struttura di uomo.
[Similarly, we think that the problem of anonymity is a false problem: it is not difficult to explain to a teenager that there exists only one person who matters: the person who took the decision, and assumed the responsibility for his or her birth. The person who provided the genetic code, by contrast, counts less than zero and is, moreover, insignificant as regards his or her human structure].17

2. Secrets unveiled

13Lisa Cholodenko’s film The Kids Are All Right (2010) imagines what happens when the children of a lesbian couple decide to go in search of their sperm donor. Each mother chose to give birth to one child, using the same donor. Now the two children – an eighteen-year-old girl and her fifteen-year-old brother – agree to contact the medical centre that assisted their mothers. They receive permission to contact the donor, and arrange a meeting. The first encounter with the genetic father is awkward, but not unpleasant, and the three decide to meet again. Unbeknownst to the two mothers, a new bond is forged, and, in a sunny and libertarian Californian setting, the man and the two teenagers become friends. When the children finally confess to their mothers, the women react with shock and confusion. The director – herself a lesbian and a mother, thanks to artificial insemination – narrates this emotional turmoil with great subtlety. Paul, the genetic father, is invited home. “Let’s pretend to befriend him and then let’s put him to sleep”, suggests Nic, the woman who appears to be in charge of family decisions. But things take a very different turn. Paul spontaneously offers a job to Jules (the other mother) and develops a crush on her. Jules and Paul, confused and incredulous, end up in bed together. When their affair is discovered, the children rally around their betrayed mother, and Jules, repentant, asks for forgiveness. When Paul, also dismayed, knocks at the door of the large family home, Nic gives him a memorable lesson about parenting: a sperm donor is not a father, and the labour of parenthood is very different from masturbating in a medical laboratory.

15The novel Carissimi (2019), by Italian writer Letizia Muratori, narrates precisely this impossibility. Nurit is an eighteen-year-old Israeli girl, who was told on her seventh birthday that she was born through artificial insemination. Her biological father, Giorgio Amati, has recently passed away, and prior to his death he and Nurit shared an intense correspondence. Nurit now wishes to reconstruct Giorgio’s life and the story of his family. She works on a documentary, which she sees as a way of expanding her own life story, and making sense of it. In an interview, Muratori explains that her novel

• 23  Letizia Muratori in conversation with Elena Marinelli, “Un romanzo epistolare per raccontare l’inv (...)

non racconta la famiglia, ma l’invenzione della famiglia. Nurit somiglia un po’ a quei ragazzi che a un certo punto della loro vita si inventano di essere stati adottati. La ragazza ha una famiglia e ha un donatore. Si sente, scrive, “creata” più che generata, e il donatore, malgrado sia realmente esistito, resta prima di tutto la sua invenzione, la sua fuga, non c’è mai il desiderio di conoscere i suoi consanguinei in quanto tali. Il sangue in questo libro, come in tutti i miei libri, conta davvero pochissimo.
[does not tell the story of a family, but the story of the invention of a family. Nurit is a bit like those teenagers who invent that they were adopted. She has a family and she has a donor. She feels that she has been “created” rather than conceived. The donor exists, but for her he remains above all an invention, an escape route. She is never really interested in the blood relation, as such. Blood counts very little in this book, as it does in all my other books].23

16Nurit is perfectly happy with her own family and does not care about blood ties. What interests her is not the biological father per se, but the story, or rather the stories, of his life. Nurit is aware that somewhere between Rome, Turin, Haifa and Jerusalem, her own life intersected with these stories. This is the plot that Nurit wishes to unveil. Carissimi narrates the challenges of multiple parenting in a serene and playful manner and thereby asserts a fundamental right: a daughter’s right to her own story.

3. Mothers

18The social and legal practice of surrogacy presupposes that different maternal functions (providing the egg, gestating the foetus, raising and loving the child) may be split among various women, and that only the latter activity (raising the child and loving them) is what makes a woman a mother. Things need further adjustment in the (now very frequent) cases of two male commissioning parents. In these cases, there will be no mother at all, and parental responsibilities and affects are distributed within the same-sex couple. In traditional surrogacy, artificial insemination is used to impregnate the surrogate with the intended father’s sperm. Over the years, and with the advent of IVF, this practice has increasingly given way to so-called full surrogacy, in which the surrogate gestates an embryo that has been created ad hoc, if possible with the intended parents’ gametes. Today, the most common ‘job’ of commissioned surrogates is thus ‘simply’ to gestate the foetus. A full discussion of the numerous political and ethical debates and the multiple arguments in favour or against this practice would exceed the scope of this article. Instead, I shall proceed to explore, through a set of case studies, how literature and film have approached this complex cultural phenomenon.

22As these examples suggest, literature typically explores the political and ethical challenges of surrogate motherhood by enfolding the two mothers in one story. As a fictional character, the surrogate is granted a history of pain and suffering, which becomes interwoven with the life-stories of the social mother and the child. Cinematic treatments of the theme, by and large, appear reliant on the same established narrative format. It is therefore perhaps no accident that the most brutal depiction of a caesura of the emotional bond between surrogate mother and child can be found in Google Baby: not a work of fiction, but a documentary. Zippi Brand Frank shows the surrogate lying immobilized, anesthetized and sobbing on the operating table, while a busy nurse leaves the room with the child, on Patel’s order: “Take it to its mother!”.

23The film Venuto al mondo (2012), directed by Italian director Sergio Castellitto, is based on a novel of the same name by Margaret Mazzantini. It narrates a drama of motherhood and surrogacy against the tragic background of the Yugoslav civil war. In the film’s opening scene, Gemma, a middle-aged Italian woman, receives a phone-call from Sarajevo. Gojko, an old friend, invites her and her fifteen-year-old son Pietro to visit a photographic exhibition about the Yugoslav wars, which ended ten years earlier. The exhibition, he explains, will feature photographs by Gemma’s beloved husband Diego, who died in Sarajevo during the war. Castellitto’s film hence interweaves three different temporal layers: the present – the end of the first decade of the Twenty-first century, Gemma’s first trip to Sarajevo in 1984, and her experiences during the early 1990s. Venuto al mondo looks back to the passionate love story between Gemma and Diego, which begins in Sarajevo during the 1984 Winter Olympics. In 1991, the two – now husband and wife – return to Sarajevo in order to mend their relationship, which has been damaged by a long and vain pursuit of pregnancy: Gemma has discovered that she is infertile. In a city on the brink of catastrophe, Gojko introduces them to Aska, a young musician who dreams of moving to London and offers, for money, to lend her womb. A planned artificial insemination fails because the responsible doctor has left the city at the first signs of war. But the three decide to carry out their project anyway. Diego and Aska shelter in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Sarajevo, while Gemma nervously wanders around. One hour later, we see Diego leave the house, evidently shocked. He tells Gemma that he could not do it. The couple flies back to Rome to resume their life together, but it soon becomes clear that Diego has lost his peace of mind. One morning, unbeknownst to Gemma, he returns to Sarajevo. Gemma enlists in a peacekeeping mission and, after weeks, reunites with Diego and some old friends in Sarajevo, now a besieged city. Gemma accidentally observes Diego as he brings food to Aska, who is visibly pregnant. He finally ‘confesses’, and some months later Aska gives birth to Pietro in a ramshackle hospital, while the bombs keep falling. The Italian mother receives her baby and Aska her pay. In the following sequence, we see Gemma board a UN airplane, with the baby and a fake birth certificate, while Diego, pretending to have lost his passport, unexpectedly stays behind. A few months later, the news of Diego’s death reaches Gemma in her flat in Rome: the messenger speaks of an accident, but to Gemma it sounds like suicide.

24Only in the final scenes of Castellitto’s film – a dramatic encounter between Gemma and Aska – the whole truth is brought to light. On that tragic afternoon, sixteen years earlier, a group of Serbian soldiers had broken into the house where Diego and Aska had sheltered to make love. The soldiers repeatedly raped Aska, after killing the other male inhabitants of the house, and finally carried her away, while Diego, hidden behind a curtain, witnessed the whole scene. Aska tells Gemma how Diego, tormented by feelings of guilt, returned to Yugoslavia to look for her, and how he finally paid a ransom to liberate her from captivity by the same Serbian soldiers. Gemma discovers, at last, that her husband only told her a very partial and misleading truth.

25Pietro is not the son of the man whose memory Gemma continues to venerate, but a child of the war. And indeed, the boy has always refused to think of himself as Diego’s son. He sees Gemma’s second husband as his real father: an Italian police officer, who, fifteen years earlier, took care of Gemma and her baby at a military airport in Rome, and who later married her. In an interesting and unsettling display of metafictional self-reflexivity, Sergio Castellitto (who in the film plays the police officer, Gemma’s second husband) casted his own son, Pietro Castellitto, as Pietro. Consequently, the actor playing Pietro looks remarkably like the actor playing his social father, Gemma’s second husband (i.e. Sergio Castellitto, who in real life is the young actor’s father). The effect on the spectator is startling: Pietro, whom Gemma erroneously believes to be Diego’s son, likes to imagine himself as the biological child of his social father. He is in fact the son of a Serbian rapist, but looks very much like the father whom he has ‘chosen’ for himself, and thus invites the audience to consider the entangled stories that often surround biological life. With tragic irony, the film narrates how Aska loses control over her body, which she initially treats as an asset that can be traded for a better life, and which subsequently becomes the site of brutal dispossession. Human bodies are at the centre of Castellitto’s narrative: from the erotic passion that overwhelms Gemma and Diego to the terrible discovery of Gemma’s sterility; from Aska’s carefree sensuality at the beginning of the film to her violent objectification at the hands of the soldiers, who laugh at the fact that they have filled her body “with their shit”. Finally, there is also Pietro’s body, which we see emerge from Aska’s womb, wrapped in a wrinkled umbilical cord, and which we encounter again, fifteen years later, in the shape of a young man standing next to his mother, Gemma. Pietro is the new life that has come into the world (“venuto al mondo”). His existence gives a hopeful meaning even to the darkest moments of Castellitto’s narrative, at least in retrospect. Pietro is therefore both the sum of everybody’s individual choices and the consequence of a brutal act of violence, yet his birth marks an unpredictable triumph of vitality. His existence marks the mystery of life itself, beyond individual choices, and beyond evil itself.

26Young, funny, lovable Pietro reminds us that the ultimate outcome of surrogacy is marvelous. Castellitto, however, does not allow us to forget that surrogacy is more than just a transient ‘enabling’ process. With melodramatic figurativeness, his film substitutes the planned surrogacy with a brutal act of rape, and thereby underlines that even the former practice leaves marks on real bodies: effects that do not simply vanish with the birth of the child. When Aska and Pietro finally meet again, at the end of the story, they seem light years away from the day when Pietro emerged from Aska’s body, in a ramshackle hospital. Pietro ignores who Aska really is and Aska is happy to keep silent about her identity, while she looks in admiration at the handsome young man whom she delivered sixteen years earlier. Aska lives now with her new partner (Gemma’s friend Gojko) and their daughter on the small, beautiful island, where she and Diego took refuge many years before. This is also the place where, subsequently, Diego committed suicide. But the world that Gemma, Pietro, Aska, Gojko, and their many friends now inhabit is a new world. While Pietro converses with his teenage half-sister, unaware of their relation, the camera frames for a second a tattoo on Aska’s neck. It is not actually a tattoo, but a burn scar, which one of the rapists inflicted on her with the butt of a cigarette. After rescuing Aska, Diego had transformed the bruise into a tattoo, giving it the shape of a flower. In one of the final scenes of Castellitto’s film, the camera frames the tattoo on Aska’s neck, because it has attracted Gemma’s attention. The frame only lasts for a brief moment, then the camera moves on. Gemma does not know what the tattoo conceals, even if she has now just learned the truth about Aska’s tragic story. In a couple of hours, Gemma and Pietro will leave, and return to Italy. This powerful last sequence, then, shows once again how the many threads of Pietro’s birth story are infinitely entangled. Gemma, Aska and Pietro do not share the same memories, and their stories of suffering and joy diverge, but at least they are allowed, perhaps for the last time, to unite in the same space.

27In her novel Non mi vendere, mamma! (2016) Italian journalist and writer Barbara Alberti treats the theme of surrogacy in a deliberately politicized style. Non mi vendere, mamma! reads more like a pamphlet than a novel, starting from its revealingly programmatic title. The book tells the story of a surrogate pregnancy, with all the indignation that tends to characterize the Italian debate on this topic. The surrogate mother is a young woman, who grew up in an orphanage and is exploited by her mean-spirited boyfriend. This caricature-like crook does not hesitate to force her into prostitution to pay his gambling debts. The couple in search of a surrogate mother is also heavily caricaturized, not least through its family name, Trump. The commissioning mother, Ms Trump, is a swimsuit model and does not want to ruin her figure with a pregnancy. Her husband is a ruthless tycoon, who wants a male heir for his financial empire. The plot unfolds, quite predictably, until the foetus’ little voice is heard, talking to his mother from inside the womb. He is, it turns out, a wonderfully cultured and eloquent foetus, who entertains his surrogate mother during long, sleepless nights by reciting William Blake and Marina Cvetaeva, or the fables of Charles Perrault. Chico (as the surrogate names him) refuses to consider her simply her ‘carrying’ mother, as if she were a vehicle. For him, she is, purely and simply, mamma. The young woman protests that she is not, in fact, his mother, that he was made with the Trumps’ gametes:

• 31  Barbara Alberti, Non mi vendere mamma!, Rome: Nottetempo, 2016, p. 45 (my translation).

– Ma che vuoi tu, che non sei manco figlio mio?
– Già… Vaglielo a dire, al corpo. Vaglielo a dire, all’anima. Ma come, mi tieni nove mesi dentro di te e poi chi si è visto si è visto? Mi dai via? Io non sono in prestito! Che brutto tiro… concepito per essere venduto. Io e te siamo una cosa sola, respiriamo insieme…
– Ma ovulo e spermatozoo sono dei Trump!
– Ma tu sei mia madre.31
[–What do you want from me? You are not even my son!
–Well… Go and tell the body. Go and tell the soul. You keep me for nine months inside you and then… who cares about the rest?! Will you give me away? I am not for borrowing! What a bad joke… to be conceived only to be sold. We are one and the same thing, we breathe together…
–Egg and sperm came from the Trumps!
–But you are my mother.]

29The Kid and the Tramp, holding each other tight, are a quintessential symbol of the love that exists independently from biological ties: an enduring emotional bond that links the child to his adoptive father. Paradoxically, in the final scenes of Alberti’s novel, this is precisely the image that triggers the love of the surrogate mother, who only hours earlier had wanted to give the child away. For the author of Non mi vendere, mamma, the ‘stranger’ who discovers her affection is not a random woman in the street, but the child’s biological mother, who must learn to love the newborn. The intricacy of Alberti’s intertextual reference reminds us, once again, of the infinitely complex, rugged conceptual terrain on which birth stories walk. Parental love is not purely defined by biology and, certainly, it has nothing to do with money. Like in many traditional moral tales – a genre that shares many traits with Alberti’s novel – the message is clear: surrogacy must be condemned, not only because it treats women’s bodies as if they were ‘containers’, but also because it is predicated on abysmal social inequalities. Markets should have moral limits: there are things that money should not be allowed to buy.

4. Frozen embryos, frozen time

31This practice – which has proven to be divisive, like many other forms of ART – provides the inspiration for British writer Rupert Thomson’s novel Katherine Carlyle (2015). Narrated in the first person, in a lucid and urgent present tense, this book tells the story of a nineteen-year-old girl, or rather, as she explains to a friend, of a girl who is nineteen, but also twenty-seven. Thomson’s prologue opens with a meticulous but also poetic description of Katherine’s conception:

• 34  Rupert Thomson, Katherine Carlyle, London: Corsair, 2015, p. 3.

I was made in a small square dish. The temperature was 37 degrees Celsius, like the inside of a human body. Like a womb. […] My mother’s eggs were placed in the wells, no more than three in each, and then my father’s sperm was introduced, the sperm allowed to seek the eggs in a simulacrum of the reproductive process.34

32What follows next is a description of the various stages of IVF: the transferal into a solution called the “culture medium”, the progressive division into cells, the monitoring by the doctors. Suddenly, however, Katherine’s story comes to an abrupt halt: “Though I was one of several ‘Grade 1’ embryos – clear cells, tight junctions, no evidence of fragmentation or ‘blebbing’ – the technicians did not select me for immediate implantation. I was preserved instead” (p. 4). Katherine’s embryo is kept in a steel barrel, filled with liquid nitrogen. It is suspended in a bath of cryo-protectant and other assorted nutrients, and exposed to an extreme and constant temperature of minus 196 degrees. There she remains for eight years, after which her parents decide to have the embryo implanted in her mother’s womb.

Every now and then, and just for a few seconds – reads the last paragraph of the prologue –, the lid was lifted off the storage tank and a torrent of white light poured down through the swirling mist. A number of embryos would be removed, but I stayed where I was, in my see-through straw. The lid was replaced. Darkness descended once more. (p. 5)

33When the main part of the novel begins, Katherine is nineteen and lives in Rome. She has been accepted to study in Oxford, but spends her days wandering aimlessly. She has no particular desire to go to university, nor, for that matter, to continue the life that she has led until now. Her mother’s death of cancer, seven years earlier, left a wound that refuses to heal. Her father, a war reporter for CNN, is rarely home and has spent even more time traveling since he lost his wife. Alone, despite her many friends, Katherine feels oppressed by a sense of non-existence that she describes as

the feeling that I’m not there. It’s not that I’m dead. I’m simply gone. I never was. Panic opens inside me, slow and stealthy, like a flower that only blooms at night. The eight years are still with me, eight years in the dark, the cold. Waiting. Not knowing. (p. 11)

34To overcome this nagging sense of unreality, Katherine decides that she must undertake a journey, without knowing where it will take her. A set of mysterious, apparently random signals seem to suggest a destination: a banknote found in the street, a phrase caught from a conversation between two strangers, an amulet collected from the ground. These ‘messages’ indicate the North, cold and silence. Katherine catches a flight to Berlin and there she makes friends with strangers who welcome her, listen to her and help her overcome her sense of emptiness. But Katherine is obsessed with the idea of escape, and continues her journey. She changes names, to confuse her father who she believes may be looking for her. From Berlin, she travels to Warsaw, then to Moscow, to Arkhangelsk on the White Sea, and to Norway. Finally, she reaches a most remote place – an islet in the Arctic Ocean – where she leads a minimal life, little more than bare survival.

35What is the goal of Katherine’s journey? In one of the novel’s final pages, Thomson’s protagonist muses that the small island near the Arctic Circle has given her a sense of the eight years spent in the steel barrel, filled with liquid nitrogen. She even believes that she has been joined by the lost embryos of her unborn siblings: “the thawed embryos implanted at the same time as me” whose cells degraded, “their gorgeous yellow darkening to a grim doomed black” (p. 307). One evening, during a bath in the public swimming pool, she sees them float by, evanescent like bubbles of water.

36But is this really what Katherine was looking for? During her drawn-out inner monologues, she repeatedly deplores the fact that she had to spend eight years in a frozen state. “Why did you make me wait?” she asks her father, one night; and then answers her own question: “I know why. It’s because you thought I’d be a monster, didn’t you. And maybe that’s exactly what I am – to you” (p. 149). Another time she rebukes her father for having deprived her of eight happy years with her mother, whom Katherine could have been close to for twenty years, not twelve. Eight years of frozen time weigh on Katherine’s conscience, and heighten her profound sense of abandonment. If only her mother was still alive, or if her father spent more time with her, these years would acquire a different meaning. But Katherine feels abandoned by her mother and also by her father, and she flees, in order to be pursued.

38And yet, it is hard to believe that the reference to the frozen embryo, waiting for eight years, only serves to add pathos to the story of an absent father, who does not fill the gap left by his dead wife. Thomson’s novel also explores the limits of wilfulness, and asks how far we can go in our desire for total freedom. Katherine, like the doctors in a birth clinic, ‘experiments’ with her own life. Katherine Carlyle is thus not only a novel about mourning, but also a philosophical meditation on freedom and audacity: what does it take to create an embryo, ad hoc, and to keep it frozen for eight years? What does it take to re-invent one’s life, as Katherine does, madly and recklessly?

39Thomson’s novel raises questions that do not have an easy answer. Is it ethical to create an embryo and to suspend its development for eight years? “Such a curious notion, to be the defunct or superannuated version of something that hadn’t even existed. Like being a ghost, only the wrong way around”, as Katherine puts it in the prologue (p. 4).  Are we ready to live with the consequences of such a decision? 

5. Conclusion

41Liza Mundy’s sensitive and nuanced inquiry into the world of assisted reproduction draws from hundreds of interviews with people who are or have been involved with ART: doctors, parents, children, psychologists, women’s groups, activists on both sides. In the conclusion to her study, Mundy observes that “one of the most striking things about assisted reproduction is the way it creates dilemmas that are so much harder for women’s groups to grapple with than abortion, which seems, in contrast, almost easy to think about”. Notions are slippery: choice, reproductive freedom, rights. Whose choice? Whose freedom? Whose rights? The rights of the parents, of the children, of the donors, of the surrogates, of the human species? The right of the doctors to offer services at whatever costs patients are willing to pay? The freedom of the private individual against the State?

42Many stories of assisted reproduction convey a sense of unpredictability. In this respect, they resemble all birth stories. By definition, a birth changes the world where it happens. But medically assisted births mark an especially dramatic change. Ironically, medically assisted reproduction is often the least controllable form of reproduction. Situations frequently take unexpected turns. This is why novels and films, and any kind of artistic reflection on these themes, can help us explore the brave new world of reproductive technologies. Literary and filmic narratives have a clear inclination to embrace the complexity and unpredictability of human experience, to stage and listen to different and divergent voices. For this reason, novels and films can offer an epistemic aid to navigate the troubled waters of our present. If they cannot provide definitive answers to the many dilemmas created by the incessantly evolving techniques of assisted reproductive medicine, they can at least help us formulate new questions.