Inspired by comments I found insensitive, at best, and ugly and judgmental, at worst, I’m going to talk about infertility, hoping to rise above a caricature that bordered on selfish, empty-wombed harpy.
I think it’s fair to say that many women spend our early years of sexual activity trying to not get pregnant. We do so without knowing if we even have the ability to get pregnant. That is certainly a plus about birth control being available in the U.S. It’s only once we’re in our 30s that some of us learn that, well, maybe we spent all that money on the Pill and could just have easily have focused solely on disease prevention through condoms. We learn that we’re infertile. Or that we are having "fertility issues."
My Background
I was born three months after my mother’s 19th birthday. She had originally planned to cede her rights and had been living at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers. I don’t know if there was a family or what the frequency of black children being adopted in the 1960s was but she changed her mind upon my arrival. Mind you, according to her, I was such a funny-looking neonate that people would remark, "Oh! You have, um, a... baby!" Also, the labor and delivery were very difficult. She would never tell me that part, saying only that is was too painful to remember how painful it was. But her friends joked that she went into labor in December and I was delivered in January!
My mother is one of 11 children who survived to adulthood in her family. She is one of 8 sisters. Every adult woman descended from my grandmother has had at least one pregnancy. Everyone but me, that is. I intentionally chose "pregnancy" because not all of them then served in the role of mother and not all pregnancies were carried to term. I don’t know everyone’s history but the live-birth breakdown, of at least the sisters:
• Aunt 1 has 6 sons
• Aunt 2 had 2 sons and 1 daughter
• Aunt 3 has 2 sons and 1 daughter
• Aunt 4 has 4 sons
• Aunt 5 had 2 sons
• My mother has 1 daughter and had a spontaneous [self-induced?] abortion
• Aunt 6 had 1 son
• Aunt 7 had 1 son and ceded her parental rights at his birth
Where I’ve used the past tense without further explanation, one child was lost to tragedy. Only two of these children were younger than I. Five of my aunts are great-grandmothers. Also, among my 3 uncles, there are at least 10 children. It’s easy to see why I’d continue the assumption that I’d be able to reproduce. That’s one helluva prolific group! Of course, their parenting skills vary. Two of my female relatives, about a decade apart, had to be told by the State that it was their responsibility to take care of their children. Another two spent a lot of time high but without any State intervention, as far as I know.
Period Hell
I started my cycle very young [at the age of 9], having spotty ones at first that stabilized by my early teens. They were heavy; I had cramps, and would spend the first day writhing in pain in bed, usually with a high temperature, which made me shiver from the cold, regardless of the season. Meanwhile, my mother and her sisters had been diagnosed with fibroid tumors and other uterine maladies, which led to several of them having hysterectomies. I joke now that my family’s reproductive systems are comprised of rusty metal, chewed gum, cotton balls, and toothpicks.
At some point in my mid-20s, I’d spoken to my primary-care physician, who was my gynecologist, about some period weirdness. She asked that I monitor my temperature for a couple of months to see if there were spikes, which would be an indication of ovulation. There were. Funny, when I mentioned it in casual conversation with friends, they were alarmed and asked if I were trying to get pregnant. Um, no, but I did have an interest in learning at some point if it were even possible. I had a sonogram and fibroids were confirmed. Still, not a great cause for worry.
First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage
In the diviest of dive bars in Georgetown, I met someone. I was 28 and hadn’t planned on falling in love or getting serious with anyone but there was a sweet/non-stalker persistence. The courtship also signaled a change in my cycle: I seemed to never not be on my period. I’m talking months at a time. The doctor prescribed strong forms of the Pill. I was taking a month of pills in 7 days. This went on for 3 months, which wreaked havoc on my emotions and didn’t seem to help for any sustained length of time. The doctor said that my lining wasn’t deteriorating at the same rate and that always seemed to leave a little piece still there. I had the option of continuing to attempt to attack the problem through drugs or to schedule a D&C, which I did, hoping that starting off with a cleaned uterus might help. Ultimately, the super-long cycles ended.
We married about 1.5 years after the hormone madness. The husband and I had always planned to have children, biologically and through adoption. After a few years of marriage, we weren’t attempting to get pregnant but we were also not trying to prevent it. We than began to explore why it wasn’t happening. [Hubby wrote a hilarious account of going to have his motility tested; if we hadn’t had an argument about something else that morning, I might have kept it.] I went beyond the sonograms and had an MRI scheduled. The only thing that got my through it was calculating the odds of having to have another one any time soon. Was I wrong!
The radiologist was standing in the room, commenting to the nurse that he could see a mass but couldn’t be sure if it were cancerous. I was right there as he kept repeating the words mass and cancerous but not to me. I gently wept. I went back to my gynecologist, who gave me a referral to see a gyno-oncologist. I had to go back for another MRI! They couldn’t understand what that mass was. The concern was uterine cancer, which, depending on the stage, meant I had either a 75 or 25% chance of survival. I was scheduled for a myomectomy and a laparoscopy. I wouldn’t know going into surgery if I’d awaken with an intact reproductive system, such that it was, or having had a radical hysterectomy. In the recovery room, I learned that (1) I didn’t have cancer but (2) they couldn’t remove the mass, which wasn’t cancerous but wasn’t in solid form. My doctor described the difference in a soft-boiled vs. hard-boiled egg. I was diagnosed with adenomyosis and I was referred to the expert on the condition [when exactly did disease become condition?], who scheduled me for more testing. This time the one in which they shoot dye up you and track its trip in your uterus. One problem: the dye leaked out instantly. We learned that my left tube is pretty useless and wrapped in muscle. The right was functional. For the first time, I could see that mass. Though it’s been 7 years, I can still picture it, like a huge stone in the middle of my womb.
The expert said he’d never seen a case like it and I’m now part of his lecture on the condition. That’s never a good thing, is it? I never wanted to be Patient K. He scheduled another laparoscopy, commenting that the open surgery I’d previously had wasn’t necessary. Gee, thanks, doctor. I think it was before the other procedure that he gave me injections to put me into temporary menopause. That was a blast: Hot flashes! Now cold flashes! Now wracking sobs!! I’d been given a two-month shot, which had to be approved by my insurance company, but then surgery couldn’t be scheduled to fit everyone’s calendar so I had to get another, one-month shot. I learned from the pharmacist that the first shot would have cost $1,200. Because I had good insurance, it was $30 for me. My open surgery costs came to $30,000 but I didn’t have to pay a dime. I cannot recall the costs for the dye-injection and second laparoscopy.
From the doctor I learned that short of cutting the section out of my uterus that has the mass and sewing it back together, nothing could be done. And, to quote him, "it isn’t the best thing to cut mommy in half as a way to make a place for baby." He told me and my husband that fertility treatments weren’t advisable. He suggested surrogacy. I looked into the costs. Not on my household income. Soon after, I lost my job, making that even more distant. I also was pretty demoralized, having gone through 3 procedures [and when did surgeries become procedures?] yet still have bad, heavy periods.
Adoption as an Option
We looked into adoption, looking at international, specifically Ethiopian so the child could at least look like us. I’m often mistaken for someone from the Horn of Africa. We contemplated the idea before A. Jolie adopted from there but guess what happened once she did? We’d been through foster-parent training with the hopes of adopting locally. It was an eye-opening experience. Honestly, the thought of still having to have contact with the birth families didn’t appeal to me. I’ve seen enough addiction and neglect and children from those families [including through kinship care in my family] to know what I want.
Coda
Dealing with infertility has given me interesting options. Some roads not taken but I wouldn’t put myself in a position to judge others who have nor do I harbor extreme jealousy at those who can reproduce. It hasn’t changed my support of choice. I have a friend who said she and her husband planned on exhausting their savings on fertility treatments. The contents of anyone’s womb and any actions she takes are her business.
There are some interesting infertility statistics here and here (with an unattributed datum about the numbers who are successful after seeking treatment). I also found the following:
Fertility and Sterility, a journal of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, published findings from an infertility study sent to directors of 369 clinics or doctors' offices that offer reproductive medicine services; 210 responded. Here are some of the results, released January 18, 2005:
• One in 10 American couples is infertile.
• About 100,000 pregnancy attempts are made each year using in vitro fertilization (IVF), in which eggs and sperm are mixed in a lab dish and the resulting embryos are implanted in the womb.
• More than 177,000 babies have been born through IVF in the United States.