Infertility Survivors Finally Heard
Permission is a tricky thing. We frequently readily provide it to others but deny it to ourselves. That’s often because allowing ourselves freely to engage in activities such as sitting with our emotions can seem self-indulgent. But, in reality, it can be self-affirming. Reader Writes About Permission Denied It’s always gratifying to hear from new…
My inbox has overflowed recently with new requests for writing and guidance as well as comments about the painful lived reality of IVF and egg freezing. The academic and bioethics world is also paying more attention to IVF survivorship. Here are some of the latest deep dives into the lived IVF reality. IVF Marketing Scrutiny…
Clouds carry the power of emotions like few things in nature. They all but cry out for attention and hold our gaze with their expressiveness and shifting forms and colors. How can we not look at these dynamic skyscapes? Now, I’ve never been a deeply spiritual person in the classic religious sense, but I’ve always stood…
A daughter knows when her parents need her. Each Sunday during this endless pandemic, my 80-something parents waited for our weekly call or Facetime visit. It didn’t take long for me to see my father’s long, slow dance with dementia was taking a significant toll. An abrupt and distressing phone call was not the way…
Living the life unexpected has become all too startlingly familiar, hasn’t it? Who among us has not felt jolted by the sudden onset of this out-of-nowhere, insidious coronavirus threat to what had been our mostly well-ordered lives and sense of agency? But, from my personally Cloroxed plane seat amid the current pandemic yesterday a spectacular…
We’ve seen this movie before. Like many around the world I greeted news of the newest royal baby with joy. The joy is easy to understand. Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex have beamed with more brilliance than usual since their pregnancy announcement. Both are modern role models for self-empowerment and compassion. They’ve been…
Give voice to your grief, loss and trauma or risk being held hostage by it. If you agree with that assessment you’re in some royal good company. Prince William and Prince Harry to be exact. They got my attention in recent interviews about how grief and loss impacted their lives. Harry notably talked of how…
So for some time now I’ve been intrigued by the different ways countries treat the infertility experience. In the U.S. there’s a concerted effort by the commercial infertility industry to fund groups like RESOLVE and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The objective: to grow the market and extend customer reach. In the eyes of…
Editor’s Note: When it comes to matters of the heart, there’s nothing quite so comforting and validating as discovering you’re not alone in teasing out complicated emotions. Whether in the blogosphere or in society as a whole male voices are in the minority on the topic of disenfranchised grief. It’s rare to hear men give…
This guest post comes from Andrea Rose, teacher and budding artist. Andrea’s first husband became infertile due to cancer in their first year of marriage while they were in their early twenties. She and her current husband struggled with male factor and age-related infertility for over ten years. She has had to make difficult decisions…