To a certain degree I get what the authors of Selling The Fantasy Of Fertility feel.
When it didn’t work for us the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and part of the sixth year I felt the same feelings.
Promises felt like they were made with reckless abandon.
The emotional pull of parenthood overshadows the fact that at the end of the day, you are still the patient of a medical practice.
Practice means that success is not guaranteed. That may be cold and heartless but it is true.
To condemn an entire industry based on not getting a desired outcome is just selfish and small minded.
It’s like screaming ‘It didn’t work for us so we don’t want you to even try because it is all a racket.’
In even the best clinical success rates it’s gonna happen 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time it won’t happen.
The bigger damage this op-ed and it’s publicity will cause is with the ignorant right leaning folks I tend to vote with that will use this as a misguided attempt to promote anti abortion agendas.
Infertility treatment is not about destroying life. It’s about an unbelievable effort to create life.
Like any medical treatment, sometimes it just doesn’t work.
People going through infertility don’t need angry preaching about whether their well being is being protected.
Saying that those seeking treatments have the ‘right to know about the health risks, ethical concerns, broken marriages, and for many, the deep depression’ is like saying someone who is about to walk through fire doesn’t know they might get burned.
It’s almost insulting, and it would be easy to dismiss both of the authors as sour, angry women who are simply lost in their grief and can’t find a way out.
But I can understand their pain.
Their anger and skepticism is universal for most of the couples we’ve met in support groups over the last 16 years.
Every infertility patient who has gone multiple years without succeeding has felt those feelings.
The difference is most patients either find a way past the bitterness and anger and come to peace with it, or find a way to live with it that doesn’t involve reducing infertility science to a primitive cult of taboos and myths.
This is one of the best responses to the op-ed that I’ve read. You are thoughtful, candid, and no nonsense. I hope you will consider submitting it to the Times because your view is about 100 times better, more nuanced and more evolved, than the one it published.
Thank you for the encouragement Lee. I did send the response to Letters to the Editor at the NY Times, so I’ll let you know if they publish it! Thanks again for the kind words.