Read Online The Baby Jackpot by Jacqueline Diamond - Free Book Online

indicated the congestion. “What’s the
holdup?”
    “No seats.”
    No seats? The steeply tiered auditorium had permanently
installed, well-upholstered chairs. He didn’t see how anyone could have removed
them.
    A pretty, dark-haired woman peered anxiously from inside the
double doors. “Cole!” It was Jennifer.
    “Is something wrong with the chairs?” he asked as the man got
out of his way.
    “They’re filled.” She gestured for him to enter, and raised her
voice to the men waiting in the hall. “If you don’t mind sitting on the carpet,
you can use the side aisles. For safety reasons, you have to leave space for at
least one person to pass. Also, please avoid the area around the TV
cameras.”
    The what?
    “This way.” The public relations director guided Cole down a
side aisle, ahead of the sea of latecomers. How many people did this auditorium
hold? he wondered, as heads turned to follow their progress.
    Most of the crowd was male, with a sprinkling of women among
them, Cole observed as he took a seat on the stage. As Jennifer had indicated, a
camera crew occupied a post at the rear, which, given the steep slope of the
room, put them at his eye level. A man with a couple of cameras dangling from
his neck stood near the front, presumably also from the press. Who’d have
thought the subject would attract so much attention?
    When Jennifer reached the lectern, a profound stillness gripped
the audience. No papers rustled. These weren’t academics. They were people who
cared.
    “We are fortunate to have one of the nation’s foremost
urologists with us today,” Jennifer began. “Dr. Cole Rattigan is the innovator
of surgical techniques that have become standard...”
    His mind drifted as she summarized his education: University of
Minnesota Medical School, Residency at Yale... The audience members leaned
forward, listening intently. A few gripped tablet computers. Others held up
cameras, presumably recording video. Everything he said was likely to be tweeted
and blogged and posted online within seconds. How strange. That never happened
at urology conferences.
    “Without further ado, I give you Dr. Cole Rattigan,” Jennifer
finished.
    Applause accompanied Cole to the microphone. Several
microphones, in fact.
    He got straight to the point. “Increasingly, or perhaps I
should say decreasingly, we hear reports from around the globe that sperm counts
are dropping to historic lows,” he said. “How do we compare to our ancestors?
That’s debatable. It’s not as if anyone ran around in ancient times testing
sperm samples from the Visigoths.”
    Laughter rippled through the assembly. It felt good.
    “However, there is evidence that during the past few decades,
sperm counts have indeed decreased.” He cited a few statistics. “It isn’t only
the number of sperm that affect fertility. There’s also motility—the ability to
swim—along with speed, concentration and morphology, which means shape and
size.”
    The only noise came from fingers tapping on laptop keys and the
scratch of pens on paper. Cole hadn’t said anything interesting yet, just
provided some basic background.
    “What’s causing this?” he asked rhetorically. At the back of
the auditorium, a few more latecomers slipped in and stood against the wall.
    “The easy answer is to blame the environment.” Cole didn’t
bother reading his notes. Everyone knew this stuff—well, everyone in his field.
“Toxins in our food, our air and our water. But it isn’t that simple. Our
genetic programming and our social mores have an impact, too.”
    He explained that since sperm-producing genes exist only on the
Y, or male, chromosome, there was no way for the body to compensate for a
degraded gene with a healthy one from the X chromosome. In time, this situation
could cause birth rates to dwindle. Most species compensated with
promiscuity.
    “It may not seem very nice,” he said, “but the result is that
the guy with the healthiest sperm sires a