Fertile in mind and in soul

By MICHELE HEWITSON

If I call Dr Richard Fisher a businessman he will no doubt come after me and threaten me with gynaecological instruments. And he'd enjoy it. He comes across - has always come across - as the very smooth, very serious, seriously empathetic face of the infertility business, but, like doctors everywhere, he likes his little jokes.

In his consulting room at Fertility Associates, I'm fiddling with some wooden beads. Now, I know that these beads must have some medical purpose. So I twiddle with them, and he watches me do it for quite some time before mentioning casually that the purpose of these beads is to measure testicular size.

Fisher says that kids come in and play with them, then he tells their mothers what they're for and they wrest them from the child with a shriek. I may have let out a small shriek myself. He may have laughed.

You can see that he might need a few laughs. "There's a box of tissues, there, there and over there," he says. He is in the odd business of helping to conjure life, but he has also come "to view death now not just as ... what you've had, but what you might have had as well."

He and his wife, Leigh, lost a 12-week-old son to cot death. He says he responds to death - and this is a question that everyone who applies for a job at Fertility Associates is asked - "badly. Badly personally. And, oh, professionally badly if the professional response to death is that you should be at arm's length and deal with it. I'm much more intimately involved".

I think he is probably a very good doctor.

He is, no matter that he dislikes saying it, a good businessman too. Especially when you consider that his business is communication. He does not like to say that he is in public relations, but of course he is.

So this week the National Ethics Committee on Assisted Human Reproduction gives the go-ahead for the freezing of eggs for both lifestyle and medical reasons - and for those people with religious or moral objections to the freezing of embryos.

Lifestyle reasons? How shocking. And there was Fisher pointing out that he didn't expect to see long queues of young women lawyers wanting to freeze their eggs for the future.

He is very good at pre-preempting criticism, or so I say. He says, "No, I think there's been quite a lot of debate about egg freezing. And that's most people's concept of where it will be used, but in fact it's not."

Fisher, of course, has had longer than most to think about how the public will react. He is also very good at massaging - although he most certainly would never put it that way - the movement of knowledge through the channels it takes to reach the public. He says that he has "grown into this area, so I've watched it develop and it's under my control, in a sense. I have two to three years to think about it before I signal it. You see, what I have done for the last 10 years is ... raise it in the media, let everyone get over their kneejerk reactions. You get an opportunity to personalise it."

By this he means that if you are, say, talking about sex selection, "most people say, 'Oh yuck, that's not in the context of how I see the world'. Give them three months to think about it and they can usually find someone in their peer group for whom it might have been a good idea."

When I say, "You're very good at this, aren't you?" he says, "It's kind of you to say so."

He's a smoothie, all right. One of those fancy smoothies made with yoghurt and boosted with super-vitamins to give you energy and brain power.

He's always come across as quite posh, and as a rich bugger. He says he does think people think he's posh, because he sounds posh. "I think it's because my mother's Irish but she speaks pure BBC. And she taught me to speak, so that's how I talk."

It is also because he went to private schools so "people assume that I had a privileged upbringing. It was anything but".HIS mother, a journalist whose first job was speaking pure BBC on BBC radio, was the main breadwinner for the family - she was something of a curiosity, a working mother in 1947. His father, a fighter pilot in WWII, was injured during the war.

His mother, who is still alive, "was very committed to our lives and spent most of her income sending us to private schools".

As for the assumed riches - it costs $7000, and $150 a year for storage, to get your eggs frozen - he grimaces a bit. "It depends how you define it. If you measure it against a medical practice, in terms of income, it's nothing like it. What we do is relatively expensive, so it's not a market in which you say, 'I'll charge an amount which will make me wealthy'. We haven't got enough people in New Zealand to even consider that. Reproductive medicine is never going to make anyone in New Zealand wealthy."

He does have the nice house and the beach house, but that is the result, he says, of 20 years in obstetrics. And "look, if you live in South Auckland I am a rich bugger".

He's an odd mix of "conservative in my view of the world; I think most people would think I'm liberal in my social style".

He has been accused in the past of playing God - and it is a measure of how good he is at his job that this seldom happens these days. He believes in God. He was brought up Christian, "with a firm belief".

"I still have Christian ideals but I haven't been to church in years and have no intention of doing so. It doesn't do anything for me."

He says it took him years to become comfortable with the idea that Fertility Associates is a business. It just so happens that his role in that business is to be the guy who fronts up on tricky issues. And in the infertility game all issues are tricky, ethically speaking.

Yet when you look at Fisher you think: arch conservative, trustworthy. I would very much like to see the pictures of him in university days with his long hair, moustache and flared Viyella trousers. Even then he was a bit of an oddity: he looked the part, but he was involved in student politics on the conservative side. He most certainly wasn't marching against Vietnam.

Even then his best friends were women. "I prefer the company of women, the company I feel most comfortable in." Which is why he went into gynaecology and obstetrics. He's been having training in how to be a bloke for years.

The "extent of my blokeish behaviour" is that he now shouts at the ref when he goes to watch the Warriors play, which would be quite something to see.

Then he says, "which I would never do at Eden Park". That blokes' training - and it is somehow encouraging to know that he's not perfect - has yet to take.