Infertility Survivors Finally Heard
Limbo land looms large once again. I am well versed in limbo’s hellacious characteristics. Interminable waiting. Worry-laden uncertainty. Chronic misunderstandings. Costly and inconclusive medical care. Maddening second guessing. And the wild card? No one day remotely resembles any before or after, which makes planning impossible. Sound familiar, long-time readers and fellow graduates of Infertility School…
There are few things harder than bearing witness to suffering, grief, or pain. When we hear someone’s sorrow in their breaking voice, our hearts clench. Our eyes well up. Empathy, the glue that holds humanity together, kicks in. Empathy causes us to ache in unison. We cast about, sometimes helplessly, to find a way to…
IVF survivorship as a concept didn’t exist when I first considered the medical procedure. That was in the late 1990s. All I knew came from the well-oiled IVF industry hype machine. The growing and enormously profitable business portrayed IVF as the science world’s answer to modern family formation. IVF clinics intentionally portrayed this hugely invasive…
Fertility clinics have operated with impunity for 40 years. New reporting, though, raises issues about their business motives and commitment to patient well-being. If you’d asked me 12 years ago, will the headline “Fertility Clinics Under Fire” ever run on the cover of an international women’s magazine, my answer would likely have been: What, Why?…
Editor’s Note: I researched and wrote this piece, As dark side of IVF slowly comes into focus, even more transparency is needed, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of IVF. My thanks to the editorial team at STAT, the Boston Globe Media health site for publishing it. Excerpt: I was 15 in 1978 when Louise…
A recent IVF study led by Yale sociology associate professor Rene Almeling stopped me in my tracks, but for reasons surely different than the research team. The IVF study goal was to “assess whether different motivations for undergoing the same medical intervention affects bodily experiences.” Published in the September Journal of Social Science and Medicine,…
One story will forever mark a turning point for me. It ran June 10, 2008 so that date now has special significance. It’s the day I crossed over from a blogger writing under a pseudonym to my reveal on The New York Times homepage (yeah, I know, it still blows my mind, too). In the…
Our voices on the under-reported outcomes of fertility treatments are gaining new ground on Huffington Post. Check out the latest: a book review of Avalanche: A Love Story. To truly make an impact and expose the high failure rates of fertility treatment in today’s noisy social media/internet popularity contest, your shares and traffic matter. That’s…
Fertility treatment, IVF and third-party reproduction have been in the headlines the past few weeks. Following is a recap. The reporting, I think you’ll agree, was particularly revealing and thought-provoking. As always, welcome your thoughts. Fertility Treatment and Cancer You never want to see the words fertility treatment and breast cancer in the same headline,…
A new IVF study caught my attention just before powering down for Christmas. As much as I wanted to coast into the holidays and give my blog a rest, I couldn’t get this headline in The New York Times out of my head: With In Vitro Fertilization, Persistence Pays Off ‘Pays off’ that’s a nice…