Ida Tin’s “Dear Men” Series: Part 14 of 29 – Not becoming Pregnant

Dear Men this is for you: post 14/29 on what it feels like to have a woman’s body: Not becoming pregnant, sadly.

I have been lucky, but I have seen friends and women around me endure fertility treatments, freeze and thaw eggs, scramble money together, succeed or have it not work out. It is brutal.

I attended a conference on fertility treatment, and one number stood printed into my mind after: only 23% of the people who walk in the door to a fertility clinic walk out the door with a baby. That is 77% for whom it doesn’t work. And with the current infertility crisis (which is global) that a lot of hearts broken.

Not getting pregnant isn’t a woman’s problem. 40% of the times he has a fertility issue, 40% it’s hers, and in the last 20% we can’t see any obvious reasons for it not working.

Who gets to have paid fertility treatment is a political decision where the traditional heterosexual family structure is still being favored, so if you fall outside that norm you can add lack of access, rights and high costs to your list of agonies.

Infertility offers us some peculiar contradictions:

-We are possibly too many on the planet and yet some parts of the world have many old people and few young to care for them, so in for instance Europe and Japan there is a big political wish to encourage more child births.
-More chose not to have children while there are also more who experience the heart break of not having the children they wish.

As someone standing by as an onlooker, I have worries about where we draw ethical lines for technology in reproduction. That’s a separate issue, but potential one people have to grapple with too on their journeys.

I would love to hear your stories. What does it feel like not becoming pregnant when you want to have a child?

-This post by Ida Tin is shared on LinkedIn and is republished here with her permission. The SheSight Team has not made any changes to the content.