Infertility Treatments for Ambitious Women
I was listening to The Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio (NPR) and the show was about Infertility’s Legal Issues– the technology available to assist women with conception and how the laws are behind the trend when things go wrong.
As I listened, Diane introduced fertility doctor, Dr. Paul Gindoff and he proceeded to talk about what infertility treatments were and started promoting them as a great method for women to use if they wanted to postpone having children solely because of their desire to pursue a career.
He made it sound easy to consider this route by saying any woman could wait to have a baby, that she could have it whenever she wanted, and she could do it this way. “Was this a commercial break?!” I thought. Definitely not. This was a guest, a medical doctor making it seem the control was all in the woman’s hands, that the timing didn’t matter and these technologies could guarantee her the desired outcome which was a baby.
I was immediately reminded of the book by Silvia Ann Hewlett called Creating A Life: What Every Woman Needs To Know About Having a Career and a Baby. Here’s a brief excerpt from the book which tells you why it came to mind:
The plain fact is, if you are a career woman who has had the tenacity to nurture both a career and a long-term loving relationship, you might well be on the wrong side of 35 before you have time to draw breath and contemplate having a child- exactly the point in life when infertility rears its ugly head. Media hype notwithstanding, the new reproductive technologies have not solved fertility problems for forty-something women.
I’d add that the reproductive technologies have not solved the problems for thirty-something and even late twenty-something women either. I’ve known many women who sought medical intervention to conceive a child because nature simply wasn’t cooperating with their bodies, not because they held off too long due to career aspirations.
The stories and statistics given in Creating A Life about women who went this route and couldn’t conceive, even after years of infertility treatment show a different side of this reality. It’s not as easy, yet media doesn’t talk about those women and their stories. Hearts are broken, relationships are strained, bank accounts are stressed and no baby results. When it comes to what is reported on infertility treatment, there’s lots of coverage on Hollywood actresses and singers having babies in their 40’s, and of course, OctoMom’s latest shenanigans or Kate Gosselin and her 8 kids she supposedly doesn’t care for because she has desires to dance.
Trouble on the conception front is far too common nowadays, so for this doctor to make it sound like getting pregnant has never been easier for women, well, I’m just a tad bit annoyed by the misinformation. I’m sure there are women out there he may be speaking to, but I would find it hard to see them as the majority of interested clients.
This may have also hit a nerve for me, because I had trouble initially conceiving both my children. The reasons behind this were potentially related to stress, unhealthy eating, a non-active lifestyle, therefore causing an imbalance in hormones, possible endometriosis, and resulting in infertility. I never found out if I had endometriosis, because I took a different path to conceive my children by first trying to get to the root of my problem and correcting the imbalance.
Then I explored Mayan Abdominal Massage via The Arvigo Technique which is a non-invasive massage for the female reproductive organs and it worked for me. I highly recommend it as a first resort solution to infertility and overall women’s health. I drove from Dallas to Austin to have it done by Elizabeth Quigg of Sirisage and firmly believe it helped me get pregnant with both my boys. The timing was too impeccable not to believe in it. And although I didn’t go the invitro route doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have considered it. I just never made it to that point and I’m thankful for that.
Like Dr. Rosita Arvigo of The Arvigo Technique once said,
“Give nature half the chance and she has a miracle in store for you.”
In my case, it was two miracles.
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