In vitro fertilisation has enabled millions of people to experience the unthinkable since the world's first test-tube baby was born in 1978, yet its revolutionary promise has not yet been fully fulfilled. Infertility is still a highly emotional experience that many women are unwilling to talk about, and fertility clinics still reinforce traditional notions of motherhood and family. Jenni Quilter examines what it's like to be one of those women, the subject of a risky experiment and a future mother torn between want and fear, in this vivid and cutting personal and cultural history. Quilter recounts the delights and difficulties of objectification while observing her own experience through the critical lens of a critic: how medical mediates between women and their bodies, how marketing redefines pregnancy and early parenthood as a set of products, how we celebrate the ?natural? and denigrate the artificial.