The quest for the perfect baby

The most painful part of egg retrieval, one woman told a reporter, wasn't the needles or the hormones. It was discovering that a $2,000 vial of medicine she couldn't use would expire. She broke down crying in the fertility office. Then she gave it away on an underground market—medication swapping between strangers, unsafe but driven by desperation. This is the world of fertility maxing, where people are trying to optimize their reproduction with as much precision as they can buy.

Sperm maxing: ice packs, raw garlic, and the search for answers

Ariel Damm, a journalist covering men's health, spoke with a 30-year-old man who was told by his doctor he would probably never have children. The news hit him on Valentine's Day. "The room was in slow motion and he started crying," Damm recalls. "He said, or he thought to himself, what does it mean to be a man if you can't reproduce?" He gave himself three months to try everything: sitting with ice on his groin while watching TV, sleeping naked, wearing looser underwear, keeping his phone out of his pocket, cutting alcohol. "There's varying degrees of scientific evidence that these things could be helpful," Damm says, "but in his case it was successful. His wife received a positive pregnancy test."