Baby-Making by Lottery
Dr. John Zhang, a well-known specialist in reproductive medicine who runs the New Hope Fertility Center out of a vast and science-fiction-looking office on Columbus Circle, believes he has played a singular role in the fiscal health of New York City. Patients come to him from around the world, from the Middle East, from Kenya, from Nigeria, Spain and China. Perhaps especially from China.
Dr. Zhang is a native of Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province, “a city that produces smart people,” he explained on a recent afternoon from behind a desk with a view of Central Park and the Time Warner Center, where he lives. Jack Ma, the business magnate and founder of the Alibaba Group, is also from Hangzhou. “People say, ‘Who are the two most famous people from Hangzhou?’ They say, ‘Dr. Zhang and Jack Ma!’” Dr. Zhang’s speaking style rarely omits enthusiastic punctuation.
Infertility treatments can take a long time and often require daily blood tests, so his patients stay in hotels — expensive ones, like the Mandarin Oriental around the block — and go to restaurants, he pointed out. In many cases, they bring along their mothers and friends, generally supplementing the city’s tax base with a kind of endocrinological tourism. Come for the Clomid, stay for Per Se.
Some of Dr. Zhang’s patients, envisioning further babies and more in vitro fertilization procedures and births in New York, wind up buying pieds-à-terre on West 57th Street, he told me. “It goes both ways,” he remarked, meaning that he often receives patient referrals from real estate agents.
In the case of Dr. Zhang’s lottery, winners must agree to forfeit their anonymity, because their good fortune is to be announced next week via Facebook Live, as if they had won a chance for free makeovers at Sephora.
What of the couples already haunted by infertility, the men and women who might have depleted their finances after two or three failed cycles of treatment, whose hearts are now soaring with new hope? What happens when they lose? Dr. Zhang’s position remains that his gambit will ultimately lead to more discussion of infertility generally and reveal how vast the community of couples struggling with the issue really is. In a sense, what he is doing merely caricatures the Las Vegas-style medical culture we already live with, especially in New York, where often the best doctors don’t take insurance — they need not bother — making themselves, in effect, available only to the well-off.
Advances in infertility treatment, specifically the procedure pioneered by Dr. Zhang using nuclear transfer, known as egg rejuvenation, would only further favor the wealthy if it ever came into use. In this situation, the DNA of an older mother would infuse the healthy casing of a donor egg, from which the young donor’s own DNA had been removed — “The Handmaid’s Tale” in a new, if more benign, version.
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