Infertility Survivors Finally Heard
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…
In a Telegraph newspaper column, It’s adults, not teens, who need a sex talk, UK journalist Bryony Gordon describes a friend who runs a fertility clinic in central London who is: …slack-jawed with amazement at all the highly educated, highly paid, highly functioning couples who pass through her doors every day with only the most…
Come again? Did I read that wrong? Hasn’t aging always been synonymous with losing fertility? Menopause, anyone? Seems odd to call out normal aging as though it’s a disease or a condition that needs to be treated with procedures. In fact, the bigger question is why are women waiting until the age of menopause to…
There were many troubling headlines about the fertility industry this past week: Women “Exploited” by Egg-Freeze Clinics Don’t bank on IVF, warns new fertility watchdog chief Data Murky on Fertility Rates Should a Woman be Allowed to Hire a Surrogate Because She Fears Pregnancy Will Hurt Her Career? The Subtext: When it Comes to ‘Fertility’…
Editor’s Note: Updates (10/26) included below from BBC Health. It’s been more than a month since the op-ed prompted by failed infertility treatments, “Selling the Fertility Fantasy,” ran in The New York Times. Infertility stories that don’t end in a baby don’t grab headlines. But this one did. It reverberated across the infertility blogosphere to the…
It’s been a few years since I first began to pick up the pieces broken and splintered off in the tempest of infertility and failed IVF. Because there were no instructions for reassembly, no “how to cope with infertility” imparted by elders or learned through societal observation, I’ve had my fair share of trial and…
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…
The older I get the more intrigued I become with where we derive knowledge and what shapes our view of the world. Apparently we are born with an innate predisposition to favor those who are similar to us (more on that later in this post). Fortunately we also have the capacity to expand our thinking,…
“At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.” -Daniel T. Gilbert, Harvard Psychologist How good are you at predicting who you will become? If you’re like most people you’ll underestimate how much change awaits you. This conclusion was born out in a research paper published in Science…
We homo sapiens have a love affair with our DNA. How else can you explain our fascination with our genes? More than a few industries have formed around exploring, propagating and tracking our DNA. While most humans are focused on ensuring their DNA’s future, those of us who are unable (or elected not) to procreate can only look back. The…