Shopping for fertility markets: when it comes to reproductive technology, Americans are more tolerant than the French.

• Author: Faure, Guillemette

"IN A world without AIDS," says Bernard Lejeune of the Edith Cavell Clinic in Brussels, "women would probably go to Club Med and get laid, and the problem would be solved."

But not only does the world have AIDS, the French world in particular has restrictions and cultural mores that force single women like me to cross borders to seek out the few clinics that offer assisted reproductive technology (ART) to nontraditional clients. Two-thirds of Lejeune's patients come from France. In Spain there are fertility clinics where almost the entire staff speaks French.

I first became fascinated by the reproductive differences between countries when I was living in New York and researching the world of sperm banks for my own use. There are huge variations not only in what is legally possible but also in what is perceived as morally right or wrong.

The European geography of the authorized and the taboo is hard to interpret. There is no north-south line, no east-west Europe, no Catholic-Protestant frontier. ART is available for single women in Denmark but not in Germany or Switzerland. Egg donations are compensated and available for single women in Spain but not in Italy.

Americans might think of the French as more permissive on moral issues. But in France, gamete donation, sperm insemination, and in vitro fertilization (IVF) are available only to married couples or common-law spouses. During every public sex scandal in the U.S., my French friends like to make fun of "l'Amerique puritaine," but then I tell them that in America the only thing required from a single woman who wants to get pregnant is a credit card.

"Well, I doubt that would be possible in Texas," replied one French researcher who studies donor-conceived children. Why Texas? It's the old French shortcut: Texas = George W. Bush = the Christian right. Yes, I replied, even in Texas. Assisted reproductive technology for single women has never been much of a political hot potato in the U.S.

The cultural stereotypes go in both directions. I remember one dinner party where an American single woman confessed how uncomfortable she would feel if she had to live with her boyfriend under one roof without eventually getting married. "You French are more open about that," she said. But while the French are not nearly as obsessed with marriage, they have a much more traditional vision of family. When I told her that in France reproductive technology is strictly reserved to infertile couples, she was...