What is Infertility?

18 June 2010

 

What is Infertility?

Ask a doctor and they will tell you that medically if is the inability to attain or sustain pregnancy after one year of unprotected intercourse. Enough said. Point closed.

Ask a person experiencing it, and they will tell you that it is so much more than that:

• Physically it is years of tests, procedures, pills, and needles.
• Emotionally it is one of the toughest roller coaster rides of cyclical hope and devastation you will ever experience.
• Mentally it is a hard concept to grapple with. There could be a reason, or no reason at all.
• Romantically it changes your your sex life, and your own connection with your most intimate body parts.
• Spiritually it challenges your belief in a higher power, in fairness, and in what is meant to be and not meant to be.
• Socially it is an isolating and terribly misunderstood problem for something so common that it affects 15% of the population.
• Politically it is debated and debated and change is glacial.
• Financially it is incredibly expensive and can rapidly drain your life savings with no guarantee of success.
• Biologically it is the potential lack of passing on of one’s own genes.
• Ethically it pushes boundaries in a number of areas that you never previously thought you’d need to go.

This permeation into all aspects of life is why it is such a difficult diagnosis. None of us are here because of the first reason, we are all here because of the latter 10 (or more). I used to believe that as soon as I got pregnant, I'd get infertility amnesia. I now know that even if you “resolve” your infertility by getting pregnant, adopting a child, or living child-free, you will always carry a little piece of infertility with you for life.