Making babies

Gao Shiyou, director of Reproductive Medicine Center at a hospital for women and children in the same city. [Photo by Zhang Wei / China Daily]

More crowded hallways are visible at Hunan Provincial Hospital for Women and Children, another place in Changsha for people pursuing assisted reproduction. Here, Liu Yao, 26, and her husband, Wu Qingtao, 31, have come from the province's Zhenzhou area to have a "test-tube baby".

Yao says her tubular obstructions can't be rectified by surgery and they have to undergo IVF cycles. A normal cycle takes four months or so.

But some experts also see a potential slowdown in such assisted births in China in the coming times. Gao Shiyou, 49, the director of the hospital's reproductive medicine center, for instance, says the use of assisted reproduction technologies has peaked in the country.

Future talk

Some hospitals such as the Reproductive and Genetic Hospital of Citic-Xiangya are moving beyond plain baby-making to genetic engineering and stem cell research.

The Changsha-based hospital, among China's oldest in the field of assisted reproduction, not only serves as a large sperm and embryo bank for dozens of hospitals across the country, it is now being seen by patients as a location for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, its president Lu Guangxiu, says.

Lu, 76, illustrates with the example of a man who after being diagnosed with blood cancer a few years ago, went to her hospital to donate his sperm that could be used later by his wife to conceive a child. The man from North China's Tianjin city feared the onset of chemotherapy would change his body.