Dawn Kornstein felt the pain again.
The medication wasn’t working. There was nothing more the doctors could do. The contractions kept coming.
Dawn was 5½ months pregnant with twins, and the pain intensified with every breath. Her skin took on a gray pallor. The alarms hooked up to her monitors screamed every 15 minutes or so.
The doctor gave Dawn and her husband, Mike, the grim news: Baby Alex wasn’t going to make it. But if they delivered Alex and tied off the cord, maybe they could save Ben.
Maybe.
Dawn and Mike said goodbye to one son and willed the other to wait just a few more weeks before being born. Those weeks could make all the difference in whether he would live.
Ben died the day after his brother.
Devastated, the couple clung to this mantra: We can try again. We can have other children.
The dream is simple: To have a baby.
In generations past, couples faced with infertility had two choices: adopt a child or accept life without one.
Advances in medicine and science have provided more options: Fertility drugs. Artificial insemination. In vitro fertilization. Sperm donors. Egg donors. Surrogate mothers.
Approximately 2.7 million American couples put their faith in one or more of these options every year.
Still, not everyone who begins the quest ends with a baby. Only about 65% of women who seek fertility treatment ultimately give birth.
There are limits to what science can do, what government allows and what society supports.
Laws have not kept pace with medical innovations, leaving judges to make important decisions about the intersection of biology and parenthood with little or no guidance. What is rewarded as innovation in one state can be outlawed in another.
For some couples, the financial costs climb too high. For others, the personal costs become insurmountable.
This was the new world Dawn and Mike were entering. For them, the key to parenthood lay in Wisconsin – 1,000 miles from their Connecticut home.
