Infertility Survivors Finally Heard
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?…
With an impish look on his face my husband innocently asked if I’d read The New York Times opinion section recently. Minutes later — with the requisite cartoon steam coming out of my ears — I was harrumphing my way through Our ‘Mommy Problem.’ I could also be heard grumbling and exclaiming loudly: Finally figured…
We usually want to believe we’ll be grace under pressure, stoic and even sunny in the face of adversity. The truth is we never really know how we’ll respond to unexpected, searing pain and loss — being truly in despair — until we find ourselves facing it head on. Even then we don’t have any…
It was easy to walk a little taller on Sunday. Why? I had just consumed, back to back, articles on women fearlessly tackling stereotypes and unabashedly breaking molds. It was as though a light was switched on as I read, illuminating just how dramatically society has shifted in the past 50 years — in particular…
I’ve been spending less and less time in the infertility blogosphere — and for all the right reasons. With my mind no longer preoccupied or dogged by tortured emotions associated with not being in the mommy club, the messiness of healing from infertility, or the rehab-like experience of reinvention and learning to live again, I…
If you’ve read one breathless headline in popular media about the latest and greatest breakthroughs in fertility medicine you’ve read them all. Articles written about reproductive medicine routinely characterize assisted reproductive technologies (I.U.I, I.V.F., donor eggs, egg freezing and surrogacy) as a “sure thing” when, it turns out, close to 80 percent of the cycles…
Very few women (or men for that matter) reach the lofty business heights of the latest Mrs. Alphas in the headlines: COO Sheryl Sandberg and former CFO Erin Callan. Sheryl, 43, has been on an extended book tour to encourage young women to lean in to their ambitions and speak up so their voices are…
Oh to have the charm and confidence that Jennifer Lawrence exhibited this past week as she tripped and then recovered on her way to accepting the Oscar for Best Actress. I marveled at the grittiness she showed in Winter’s Bone. I admired her stoicism and determination as Katniss in The Hunger Games, and I became…
In the late 1990s Crown Princess Masako of Japan faced enormous pressure to produce an heir, such pressure that some believe it changed her life for the worse and contributed to mental illness. If you had told me 15 years ago that stories on the value of the royal womb would be playing out in…
Editor’s Note: The following guest post comes from Megan, a novice to the blog world. She teases at the complexity of an infertility conundrum: How do we educate people about the infertility experience and how it reshapes us without making childlessness the only thing they see about us? I am normally a “silent” silent sorority member,…