A common theme among some who are struggling with infertility can be summed up with a plethora of curse words, most of them starting with F: “Years of Fear of F***ing for fear of pregnancy!”; “Damn, what a F****** A-hole I was to delay having a family!”; “Why didn’t my F****** doctor warn me about fertility decline?”; “I’m paying for my F****** arrogance now, thinking I could get pregnant with the wave of a magic P****!”; “And then there’s that B**** Sally, whose husband shook his shorts at her and she’s pregnant. She doesn’t even want a baby.” The list could go on.
Female fertility begins to decline when we’re born, losing 1,000 eggs per month of the 2 million we are born with, the decline becoming increasingly more significant as early as the 20’s, escalating in the 30’s, and really threatening the longing for parenthood in the 40’s.
Women, perhaps like you, who have bashed through the glass ceiling, are elbow to elbow with men in medicine, law and banking. They work like slaves, they travel for work, they run a home and nurture a relationship—and they’re exhausted. And now they want to add a baby to their lives.
A large portion of the women whom I’ve seen in my practice are in their mid to late 30’s, up to and including the mid 40’s. They are all seeking biologically related children (and understandably, it’s only when they come to terms with the jig being up that they open to the alternative route of ovum donation from a younger donor). Hard work, delaying pregnancy by virtue of expediency or choice or professional satisfaction does not necessarily preclude pregnancy, but it does leave prospective parents in shock to find themselves slapped with the indictment of being a ‘statistic’.
Keep in mind that a high-powered, intense lifestyle is not a barrier to conception. After all, women get pregnant in war zones. A concern/conflict/fear might be that motherhood would render life unrecognizable in ways that would be unacceptable. What’s even more unacceptable in my book is self-blame for a challenge to conception.
Life as it is known will evaporate. It will, but that does not mean that no one seems to be comfortable saying out loud is that a terrible conflict rages in what we can call the bodymind. While choosing the rigorous life in what used to be a man’s domain, women may be unwittingly dishonoring the need to respect the reality and the rigors of life in a female body.
STOP! If you are assuming that I think women should return to the mores of the 1950’s and seek to be barefoot and pregnant—you are wrong. What you should assume is that I feel deeply for the agony of this population, whom I’ve been serving for over 40 years—ever since I realized that I had choice. (My generation graduated from college just as Betty Fridan was beginning to rally consciousness.) After teaching fifth grade for two years, and staying home with three babies for eight, I went to graduate school to earn my MSW and have had the thrill of a very satisfying career ever since.
But back to my point: There is a wonderful book, The Red Tent, by Anita Daimont. In this fictionalized version of life in Biblical times, the Hebrews arranged for women who were menstruating or who had given birth, to go to the red tent, a place where they could rejuvenate while the community of women took care of their chores and families for them. The reality of the demands of living in a woman’s body seems to have been lost as career options were found.
Here’s the good news: To compensate for the choice of building demanding careers before building a family (or simply choosing to delay family building for any reason), intensified by the frenzied pace of modern western life, mind/body stress reduction techniques and clinical hypnosis can have a restorative and positive impact on women who wait. These techniques are proactive. They mitigate the stress of the fertility challenge itself, never mind the stress of challenging careers. They give the woman a sense of participating, as opposed to being a slab of meat, legs in stirrups. I’ve seen many of my patients of all ages achieve pregnancy when they learn to reverse the physiology of stress with these techniques, (sometimes in combination with reproductive assistance and most noteworthy—sometimes without!).
I’ve seen conceptions in patients who choose to reduce life stress by pulling themselves off the partner track in their law firm. I’ve watched as women took leaves of absence (if they could afford it, and sometimes even if they couldn’t) to separate the rigors of In Vitro Fertilization from the rigors of work. As one such woman put it, now newly pregnant, “I needed to sit in Central Park and stare at the trees.” Along with mind/body techniques, these are the modern versions of the red tent.
Under duress, the body walks the earth while the mind tours the solar system. Stress reduction methods may not come with a guarantee, but at the very least, by coming in for a landing inside themselves, women can have the satisfaction of knowing that they’ve done all in their power to prepare their female body for receptivity to a pregnancy, the decline of fertility not-withstanding.
Why are women cursing? Despite our progress, home and hearth still have enormous meaning to our gender.
Helen Adrienne, LCSW, BCD
