A RECENT NEWS STORY reports that doctors in St. Louis successfully transplanted a full ovary from one twin to another, allowing the previously infertile sister to give birth last November to a healthy baby girl. It’s the first time that a transplant of an entire ovary has resulted in a live birth, the story says.
The achievement is a marvel, of course, and—like nearly all advances in fertility—raises enormous ethical issues. Should transplanted ovaries be used to prolong the fertile years of women? This is just one of the thorny questions. There are many more, and while they are all compelling, I found myself more drawn to the personal tale of the sisters, thinking about those first conversations between the two, how this decision was made and what the birth scene must have looked like.
But not much is reported on the sisters, which is good, since that means their privacy is being appropriately protected. The topic of the deeply personal aspects of the tale remains hanging in the air, waiting to be discussed. So how can we swap thoughts without some facts? Is there some shared text we can all read and then tuck into the topic the way we want to do? That’s where the roman a clef has always been a thinking reader’s best friend.
French for “novel with a key,” among other liberties, the roman a clef lets the writer explore controversial topics without fear of exposing someone’s identity, using a thin veil of fiction.
Looking in fiction for a novel on the morality of sisters and cutting-edge medicine, I found that Jodi Picoult’s 2003 novel, My Sister’s Keeper, has been there and already done that. And while the action of the novel portrays one sister supplying another sister with a transplant, it is by no means the book’s driving force—that being left to the morality of the issue. A movie version of this book is due out in June starring Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin. Maybe we should all read it before Hollywood reduces the whole issue to mere tears.
Have you read it? What do you think?
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I haven’t read it, but am curious. Off to put it on my library request list! God bless online library services!
My first thought is how incredibly generous the donor sister is, and then I thought how lucky the recipient sister was – not because she received the ovary, but because she had an identical twin (they’re identical, right?) with the same genes to donate one. In an odd way, that is like having the universe smile on you a little bit when living through the incredible sorrow of infertility.
Having gone to what some people thought were extreme lengths, myself, to reproduce, I know there are always people who think (or, shockingly, SAY) “I would never do that.” I always respond, “You never know what you’d do.”
I knew a woman who used her identical twin sister’s eggs to do IVF. She ended up with identical twins of her own!
Hi, Elizabeth. A great response, that “You never know what you would do,” and a good motto to apply to the sisterhood, always, as we find ourselves stretching for those we have and choose as sisters. I love that. I wonder, does it ring a bell for anyone else?
“You never know what you would do” … it runs through my head all the time. It helps when trying to be less judgmental of all the people around me making what are clearly wrong-headed decisions :)
Yo, Elizabeth: Ha ha ha. Yes, absolutely. Being less judgmental is an essential part of the sister-work we do every day, especially with those wrong-headed people we know.