Inconceivable: Unregulated Sperm Donation, Crowd-Sourced Fertility, and My Unconventional Search to Become a Mother

Inconceivable combines memoir and investigative reporting to reveal an underground community of sperm donors and recipients who have chosen to circumvent traditional fertility avenues and meet up on their own terms. As an active participant in this community, Valerie Bauman uses her own story as a lens into this movement of people attempting to dodge the costly and often discriminatory world of sperm banks and fertility clinics. Inconceivable is a window into the unfair legal, financial, and medical entanglements that compel many single women and LGBTQ+ couples to take their fertility into their own hands.

Valerie Bauman is an award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience. She is currently an investigative reporter at Newsweek. Previously, she was a senior investigative reporter and senior legal reporter at Bloomberg Law, where she covered the pharmaceutical litigation beat. Bauman has also worked at Newsday and The Associated Press, where she covered Hurricane Katrina from the Mississippi bureau, and later the New York State legislature as a political reporter.