The baby maker

The baby maker: "

LONDON, Oct 25 — When, in the mid-1990s, Dr Xiao-Ping Zhai began using traditional Chinese medicine to treat infertility, her Harley Street practice was confined to a couple of rooms, each no bigger than a stationery cupboard. Patients would climb the four flights of stairs to sit on a hard chair in the tiny hallway outside her room, like lost and frightened children waiting to see the headmistress.

Along with the usual complex and paradoxical emotions felt by those desperately trying for a baby, the swings from optimism (“Yes – this could be the month it happens!”) to panic (“I’ll never have a child. Why me? Why me?”), there was also for many of them the feeling that Zhai was another guilty secret, in addition to their infertility. If these women revealed to friends and family, but especially to their mainstream gynaecology and fertility consultants, that they had resorted to acupuncture and brewing up bits of twig and moss to help them get pregnant, it would be the final proof that, in their quest to achieve what most women take for granted, they had lost the plot completely.

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