NYHOMESTUDY BLOG

Baby Lust

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

Here is a smattering of things I did during the six-year quest to conceive my daughter: interrupt love-making to squirt raw egg whites into myself with a turkey baster (it’s reputed to abet the feminine fluid that speeds sperm to egg); substitute two teaspoons of Robitussin for my morning coffee (its main ingredient thins and loosens mucous in the lungs, and although there is no actual proof, it’s thought to work similar juju farther south); down ovulation-stimulating pills that triggered fits of rage; inject myself with the urine of postmenopausal Italian nuns (the original source of some fertility drugs, though it’s hard to imagine how the goods are gathered); chug unidentifiable herbal potions that tasted like garden mulch; squander what would have been the college fund on long-shot in-vitro-fertilization treatments; imperil my marriage.

Here is what I did not do: stock up on Häagen-Dazs. That, apparently, was my mistake. According to data gleaned from the Nurses Health Study at the Harvard School of Public Health and published earlier this year in the journal Human Reproduction, women who consume ice cream at least twice a week have a 38 percent lower risk of ovulation-related infertility than those who indulge a mere once a week. What’s more, the piously health-conscious — women who eat two or more servings of low-fat dairy products, particularly yogurt, a week — are twice as likely to have trouble becoming pregnant as those who eat less than one serving of the skinny stuff.

Health advice is notoriously fickle, but never are we more willing to follow it, no matter how scant or contradictory the evidence (consider the saturated fat lurking in whole-milk dairy), than when that second pink line refuses to appear. In “The Empty Cradle,” a history of infertility, Margaret Marsh, a dean at Rutgers University, and Wanda Ronner, a physician, reported that 18th-century women paid fortunes to lie on the vibrating electrical “celestial bed” that was said to have cured the duchess of
Devonshire of her sterility. They soaked in ice water and guzzled patent medicines of “ether, electricity, air or magnetism.” A century later, they douched with silver nitrate and flocked to a physician who claimed success through “transplanting” a pea-size segment of a healthy woman’s ovary into infertile women’s bodies. If that didn’t work, there was always the other miracle cure of the day: cervical amputation.

John Rock, a Boston physician who in 1944 became the first scientist to successfully fertilize human eggs outside the body, often observed that infertile women make better research subjects than those trying to prevent pregnancy because they are so desperate. It is impossible to overestimate the frantic despair that comes with multiple miscarriages or endless months of dashed hopes.

We women will even pay for the privilege of being guinea pigs — or injecting ourselves with them: another fertility drug I was prescribed was derived from the pulverized, genetically engineered ovaries of Chinese hamsters.

Men, it is worth noting, will not. “Male factor” accounts for up to 40 percent of infertility cases (“female factor” is implicated in about another 40 percent, and the rest is unexplained or a combination), though — perhaps because infertility is often confused with impotence — that fact is less often discussed.

In the 1950s, according to Marsh and Ronner, women claimed that they’d rather go childless than request that their husbands get their sperm checked. Forty years later, in a survey of couples using sperm donors, one infertile husband told researchers that he didn’t believe the problem was his. Even today some doctors will mix in the sperm of an infertile husband with that of a donor to perpetuate the possibility, however unlikely, that the resulting offspring is genetically the husband’s.

Men’s drive to procreate is certainly as strong as women’s — for both sexes, it is, on a biological level, the primary purpose of our existence — but whether because of denial or something else, they tend, as the sociologist Arthur Greil has written, to experience infertility as “disappointing but not devastating.”

Women find it “intolerable, identity threatening.”

That wound to the psyche may cut even deeper today than in generations past, at least the recent past. Women in the post-pill, newly libbed 1960s and ’70s proclaimed “childlessness by choice” to be the ultimate emancipation, a defiant, even sexy stance. Several decades later, although living “child free” is surely an option, motherhood has been emphatically re-embraced, recast not only as an essential feminine right but also as a feminist one — to be claimed whether you are single or married, gay or straight, 25 or 59. Having children when we want them has become a symbol of our autonomy, more central to our concept of self than ever.

And if our bodies say no? That’s when the infertility industry steps in. For the lucky few for whom technology works (a mere one-third in the case of I.V.F.), it is a blessing. For the rest of us, its existence has created a new drive, as profound as either the biological or psychological: call it the techno-medical imperative, the need to exhaust every “option,” to do “whatever you can” to have a baby — regardless of the cost to self, marriage or pocketbook — or feel that you have not done enough. It is now possible to remain hostage to perpetual hope for years, unable to explore alternatives, to make peace, to move on. After all, what if the next cycle is the one? How will you know unless you try? And if you don’t, will you be left always wondering what might have been? The uncertainty is agonizing.

I sometimes wonder whether, if I lived in a culture that fetishized motherhood less — one that didn’t expect celebrity moms to coo that motherhood is the “best thing I’ve ever done,” that didn’t use babies to sell everything from toilet paper to automobiles — I would have felt as compelled to go to such extremes to attain it (which I eventually did, no thanks to the fertility docs). It’s impossible to say, though Marsh and Ronner found that even in the 1960s and ’70s, involuntarily childless women submitted to operations, high doses of infertility drugs and risky experiments with I.V.F. in order to conceive.

Apparently even then there was a world of difference between declaring you might not want a baby and being told you couldn’t have one.

So maybe it’s inevitable that a woman struggling to conceive will live her life in 14-day bursts. She will plot her charts and time intercourse with the precision of a five-star general. She will insist on the missionary position and stand on her head postcoitally. She will shoot herself up with whatever the next crazy concoction may be. And she will hope for the best. But now, at least, she can do all that while eating a hot fudge sundae.

Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of “Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother.”

Copyright 2007

The New York Times Company

Miriam’s Comments

Families frequently come to us for adoption home studies after treatment for infertility has failed. Many of these families feel that after all the unknowns involved in infertility diagnosis and treatment, adoption will be an easier and surer road to parenthood. They believe that all they need to do is choose the kind of adoption that is right for them, learn about the procedures involved, and meet the requirements, and their long a-waited child will appear. One of the things that I tell people who come to me for consultations or home studies is that unfortunately, in adoption, things do not always move along smoothly. I know that after all of the anxiety and stress they experience during infertility treatment, they crave the comfort of adoption as a “sure thing”. I can assure folks that if they are commited to adoption and if they can accept the inevitable frustrations that are almost always involved in the adoption process, they will be successful. They will become parents.

The response of some people to discovering their infertility is straightforward. Infertility is a barrier to their becoming parents. They undergo treatment so that they can have a baby. If they discover that it isn’t possible to have a biological child, they turn to other means for accomplishing this goal. These methods may involve various kinds of treatment, surrogate parenthood, or adoption. Having a baby is the goal. But for some folks, the inability to conceive a child symbolizes to them, their incapacity. They feel as if they are damaged in some way. Unless these feelings are dealt with openly in therapy or counseling, they will go underground. If this happens and then the couple adopts a baby, that baby may come to symbolize to the couple, their inability. Unconscious feelings of inadequacy or impairment, may negatively affect the way the adoptive parents relate to their child. Therefore, when we work with folks who have had to deal with infertility, we want to be sure that they have faced their grief and disappointment related to their inability to have a biological child so that they can move on to adoption as a joyful fulfillment of their dreams.