And Then There Was One ... Embryo: Meet America’s New IVF

For years, high health care costs in the U.S. have pressured couples into implanting multiple embryos, despite greater risks of miscarriages. That’s finally changing.

The hope and despair of in vitro fertilization are well-known to the family of Dr. Irfana Koita, director of IVF Matters, the United Kingdom’s first online fertility clinic. When Koita’s cousin went through IVF, she decided to be implanted with multiple embryos to have the best shot at conceiving. She did get pregnant, with twins, until 23 weeks in, when she lost them both. The experience, says Koita, was so traumatic, that her cousin “couldn’t dare think of putting herself through any more treatment.”

Her loss was far from rare for women using multiple embryos, a realization that for more than a decade has made Europe shift its IVF practices. The United States, long behind, is finally catching up.

The higher costs of IVF in the U.S. — 35 states do not legally mandate that insurance cover infertility treatment — compared with other Western nations have for years encouraged women to pick multiple-embryo therapy (MET) to increase their chances of getting pregnant in one attempt. But improvements in single-embryo therapy (SET) technology are increasing the likelihood of pregnancy through this technique, leading an increasing number of American clinics and prospective parents to turn to it, thereby reducing the risks of what happened to Koita’s cousin.

Iram Haq’s semiautobiographical films are challenging a culture that silences women.

The ride to the airport was fraught with tension. Fourteen-year-old Iram Haq’s father seethed while her brother silently drove. Haq didn’t know it at the time, but she was being kidnapped by her parents, because they had discovered she had a boyfriend. The long flight to Islamabad was also traumatic for her: She had never been to Pakistan and didn’t know anyone there. Her parents had immigrated to Norway from Pakistan years earlier. “It was pretty scary,” Haq recalls. “It was a different world.”

In that world, she says, “I grew up very fast.” But the memory of that painful time never left her. “To write the story was a big journey for me,” says Haq, now 43. “I knew one day I would tell the story in my own way, but it took me a while.” That story became her second feature film, What Will People Say (Hva vil folk si), Norway’s official entry in the 2019 Academy Awards best foreign language film category (it did not make the short list for Oscar consideration).

Loosely based on Haq’s experiences, the film follows a Pakistani-Norwegian teenager named Nisha who is kidnapped by her parents and sent to Pakistan to live with conservative relatives. The harrowing and poignant film — The Hollywood Reporter called it “intelligent” but also criticized it for lacking subtlety and nuance — generated debate in South Asian countries where honor killings and forced marriages are a given. The phrase “What will people say?” in Urdu “is used to control women,” Haq says. “I felt this was so important to tell this.”

A slew of history’s best writers suffered from physical illnesses and ailments that would help shape their literary careers.

Writers are an odd and often long-suffering bunch. Most of us know all too well the tales of psychological turmoil and depression affecting some of literature’s biggest names, from Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin to F. Scott Fitzgerald. And, naturally, some of history’s most accomplished drunks were also scribes, like William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway. But less discussed are the number of well-known authors who endured chronic physical illnesses — ailments that had a notable impact on their writing and the course of their careers, sometimes spurring them to embark on their paths to becoming literary legends.

Let’s start with asthma. “[A]sthma often correlates, sometimes fatally, with high literary achievement,” John Sutherland quips in Curiosities of Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers. And when you start down the list of literature’s great asthmatics, it’s hard not to agree: John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli and Marcel Proust, among many others. Was this just the byproduct of so many future writers being raised in overly sanitized upper-middle-class worlds? We now know that children with low exposure to infections are more likely to develop asthma.