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  • The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution
  • Mary J. Henold
The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution. By Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 374. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-801-89001-7.)

Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner's The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolutionis a conventional biography of John Rock, a "good [Roman Catholic] and as handsome as a God" (p. 223), in Margaret Sanger's words. Rock revolutionized the study of both infertility and so-called overfertility in over fifty years of clinical practice. As Marsh and Ronner trace the paths of Rock's life, they attempt to root his research in the changing landscapes of medical ethics, gender roles, sexuality, and Catholicism.

The book is most successful in its exploration of Rock's research. Each major development is laid out in fascinating detail, from the intricacies of clinical protocols to the ethical dilemmas posed by new forays into reproductive medicine. The authors pay particular attention to Rock's early studies in embryology, which were heavily criticized in the 1980s by feminists who viewed his work as exploitative. Rock chose women for the study who were already scheduled for hysterectomies. He encouraged them to have sex in their fertile period just before surgery on the chance that he could then isolate early-stage embryos in their removed tissue. Marsh and Ronner argue, convincingly, that Rock and his (often Catholic) patients did not believe that life began at conception and, furthermore, that his patients were properly informed and willing to participate. The book is at its most readable in chapter 5, which compellingly describes Rock's compassionate approach to clinical practice by chronicling the experiences of his patients who suffered the pain of infertility as well as the stress of bearing unwanted children. These chapters are a highlight in a book that can get bogged down in the repetitive details of biography.

This study is less successful in its attempt to explain Rock's life and work in the context of his Catholicism. Discussions of the Church's reactions to Rock's development of the birth control pill, for example, offer little new insight into this turbulent era of American Catholic history. The authors' understanding of the Church at this time seems unsophisticated. For example, on the basis of an editorial in America,they claim that all Jesuits ("heirs to the legacy of Saint Augustine" [p. 244]) opposed contraception. The book does chronicle various Catholic responses to the pill, culminating in Humanae Vitae, but does not attempt any new analysis of American Catholic culture in the 1960s. Any inclusion of Catholicism is offered mainly to fill out the story of the pill's development and explain Rock's position.

The book does, however, offer scholars of American Catholicism a useful portrait of a committed Catholic who deliberately stretched and molded his faith to fit both a more modern world and his own conscience, long before the Second Vatican Council made such flexibility more acceptable. Rock was openly critical of laws prohibiting the dissemination of birth control as early [End Page 887]as the 1940s and became a strong advocate for the theological as well as clinical acceptance of the birth control pill. He publically called on Catholics to exercise the primacy of conscience, predicting a time when Catholics would simply ignore the teachings of their Church. In several places in the book the authors struggle over whether to label Rock "devout" or not; Rock's story illustrates why such questions are fruitless in an age when principled Catholics like him were remaking the very definition of faithful Catholic.

Mary J. Henold
Roanoke College

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