SOURCE: “Bringing Back Baby,” in The Nation, May 26, 1984, pp. 645-6.

In the following review, Gordon offers unfavorable assessment of Sex and Destiny.

Because this book about fertility was written by a woman suffering from infertility it elicited my sympathy even before I opened it. I would not mention Germaine Greer's personal situation had she not reported it herself in The New York Times and in several other interviews. And that too—her openness about a painful and stigmatized subject—won my respect. Nevertheless, and despite Greer's opinion, the pain of infertility is not biologically determined; instead the meaning and experience of “barrenness” are created by culture, have changed historically and will undoubtedly change further.

Although improved health care in industrial societies has increased fertility in general, the current practice of postponing childbearing ten or twenty years has itself become a cause of infertility. And perhaps this—the knowledge...