Episode Details

 We can initiate a pregnancy by handling eggs and sperm outside the human body. We can remove these elemental factors from people fundamentally changing the way eggs and sperm were built to interact and reinsert them into a woman's body to produce a pregnancy and eventually a baby. 

It's an audacious and remarkable feat if you think about it, something that all generations of living creatures before us could not do. As if that wasn't enough, we can do it despite the fact that not all the details of fertility and pregnancy have been worked out. 

Helping people manage fertility has been around for nearly 250 years, starting with aides to insemination, just handling sperm, which are, accessible enough. But in the last 50 years, the increasingly complicated ways in which we can interact with eggs and sperm to create a pregnancy is mind blowing. This week we're gonna talk about some of the groundbreaking technologies that have been developed over the last three or four decades to maintain and extend fertility, we'll also look at what this process teaches us about fertility and pregnancy.