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…
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,…
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…
Huh, Infertile? What?? I know. The headline seems somehow wrong, does it not? I’ll repeat the words slowly so you have time to wrap your head around them: All…Women…Are…Infertile…Most…of…Their…Lives. It’s mind-blowing mostly because we are not programmed to view infertility from this angle. This conundrum first came to light in working with a colleague on…
Warning to those in a raw or vulnerable state: take caution listening to the interviews and discussions linked below. As I come up on my seven-year anniversary of The New York Times piece, Facing Life Without Children When it Isn’t by Choice (June 10, 2008), I can’t help but be reflective. If you went…