America’s frustration, impatience, and angst around BP’s attempt to cap the deepwater oil spill felt remarkably familiar, an echo of a more personal demand for science and technology to step it up.
We live in an age of unprecedented knowledge and technological advancement. There should be no problem we can’t solve—and fast, right?
Oh, if that conviction were only true. A New York Time’s piece, “Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill,” got to the heart of the matter with this statement about our technology hubris: “The struggle to contain the oil spill in the gulf challenges an American belief that technology can solve any problem.”
It is downright unsettling to have our beliefs challenged. The difficulty managing the disastrous Gulf oil spill or confronting an Icelandic volcano spewing ash into the atmosphere (where the reaction was, according to Pew Research’s Andrew Kohut: “Fix this, fix this. This is outrageous.”) offer teachable moments about the limits of science and the rarely acknowledged examples of technological impotence.
Just because we think something can be done doesn’t mean it will always work. Our misplaced belief in the supreme power of technology doesn’t serve us well and can lead us to a false complacency or the wrong assumption.
While the world has been perplexed by daily reports on the failed efforts to contain the oil spill, two well-known celebrities, Kelly Preston and Celine Dion announced pregnancies. Given the backdrop, it’s not a stretch to see these pregnancies through the prism of today’s news. Kelly and Celine’s outcomes are “junk shots” of a different sort.
At forty-seven, Kelly joins a unique club of celebrities closing in on fifty and preparing a nursery. Details surrounding the “surprise” pregnancy have been minimal. Celine, forty-two and pregnant with twins, on the other hand, has been forthright about her struggle to conceive and her reliance on science and technology to achieve pregnancy.
Unlike the detailed reporting chronicling BP’s failures, mainstream media takes a different approach where assisted reproductive technology (ART) is concerned. The success stories more often than not disguise the larger truth that the ART “junk shots” for most couples will end up like BP. Seventy percent of ART attempts fail, as was made clear by ob-gyn Dr. Jennifer Ashton in a CBS News interview: “When you look at ... all cycles using non-frozen embryos, the success rate approaches about 30 percent,” Ashton says. “Now, that is heavily dependent on age. The older you get, whether you’re using your own egg or not, the success rate of a live birth goes down.”
And to make sure her point got through, she reiterated, “Again, just because we’re seeing it [pregnancy] in the forties does not mean it’s easy.”
Dr. Ashton’s points are echoed and amplified by Judith Daniluk, a professor in counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia in a recent article in The Globe and Mail:
“One in six couples experiences infertility, according to the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. Many end up at fertility clinics, but the chances of success plummet with age. For women aged thirty-five to thirty-nine who undergo one cycle of IVF, the live birth rate is 26 per cent. For women forty and over, the rate drops to 11 percent.
In the age of fertility gone amok—from Octomom to Holly Hunter giving birth to twins at age forty-seven, likely using donor eggs—Dr. Daniluk points out that there are no role models for couples who can’t have kids.”
Instead of hearing about infertile couples who create fulfilling lives, she adds, “we hear ‘keep going’ and ‘fifty isn’t too late.’”
Technological development on all fronts will continue—and that’s inherently a good thing—but appreciating that technology is fallible can help us develop a better understanding of the challenges and mysteries we face today whether in deep water or around conception and delivery.
