Tonight is our IVF Orientation class. I’ve been jotting down questions to bring with me for the last month. Some are about exercising while cycling, some are about the cryo process, some are about the shared risk program and some are about the drugs. If you can think of anything I should be asking about tonight please let me know.
I’ve been trying to read about IVF and understand the process better so I went to the library to check out some books. Except there were no books to check out. None. Not a single book that explained IVF or talked about the emotional or physical effects of IVF. But there were plenty of books about the social and moral implications of making a test tube baby. Yup. That’s right. These books were still calling children of infertility TEST TUBE BABIES. How very politically correct.
Then last night as we were getting ready for bed I noticed a show on TLC called Multitude of Multiples. Now let me just say that I think TLC is the worst exploiter of infertile families in the country (J&K+8, Table for Twelve, etc.) but considering this show was framed as a medical show about families of multiples I watched anyway.
The show was advertised as “Three families experience the dangerous business of giving birth to and raising multiples including the first Hispanic sextuplets in the US, an expecting mother of quadruplets and a family with twenty-two month old quintuplets!”
And when they discussed how the mothers ‘ended up this way’ the most that the show’s narrator said was so and so underwent a procedure called IUI which led to her quintuplet pregnancy. Or so and so turned to injectible medications to help her have a family.
Really, IUI caused 5 babies? What about the drugs she was taking? What were they? How many of the embryos split? Was she being monitored?
I mean really. If you are going to do these types of shows, then be socially responsible and EDUCATE the public. Don’t just allow people to be voyeurs into someone’s life for the sake of curiosity. Explain to them how long this family struggled to make a baby, the complications that were involved, the risks they took to expand their family, and how many times they failed before they ended up with 5 premature babies in the NICU.
Unless you’ve been here, you don’t fully understand what this process is like. And that’s okay. I don’t expect everyone in the world to get it. But we can at least remove the stigma that shrouds infertility. We’re not all a bunch of desperate baby mongers who’ll risk life and limb to conceive.
