Let's smash the IVF wall of silence
An impassioned plea from a woman going through the emotional rollercoaster so many face
As a result of a ruptured appendix, I am infertile. The appendicitis, which happened four years ago when I was 31, was followed by gangrene and peritonitis. My partner and I had been trying for a baby for two years before I found out the damage the illness had done — permanently blocking my Fallopian tubes and leaving me needing IVF for a chance to have my own child.
I have never felt shame about my situation, but I have felt isolation and grief, both of which would be very much more bearable if people were prepared to talk openly about in-vitro fertilisation — to dispel the taboo that still surrounds it.
IVF in its various forms is incredibly common these days.
More than 2.5 million babies have been born in the past eight years thanks to fertility treatment. For various reasons, some known, some unknown, overall birth rates in the West are falling rapidly and infertility is rising. Pretty soon, one child in every ten born in this country will owe his or her life to fertility treatment.
You might reasonably think, then, that when I underwent my first (failed) IVF cycle in February, then had my Fallopian tubes removed before a second failed cycle in June, I’d have been surrounded by f riends and acquaintances keen to give advice and share their experiences.
The truth is I struggled to find any, and when I raised the subject in public people shifted uncomfortably — as though I had transgressed a social boundary — or reacted with fascination, wanting to know all the ins and outs.
Everyone I spoke to knew someone who’d been through it, but no one would admit to having had IVF.
One couple I met at a dinner party knew intimate details of a ‘friend’s’ treatment that they were only too willing to share. When I later discovered this couple had non-identical twins, their expertise suddenly made sense. They did subsequently own up, but I was disheartened that they’d been so coy at first.
To a certain extent, I understand this reluctance to talk about IVF. Back in t he l ate seventies and Eighties, when the first ‘ test- tube babies’ were being born, patients were under pressure to keep their treatment secret.
The receptionist at the pioneering Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge has spoken of women expressing disgust that she worked in a ‘test centre where they made babies’.
and that horrified reaction — the idea that IVF involves some sinister process — still lingers.
Last s pri ng, the designers Domenico Dolce and stefano Gabbana branded IVF children ‘ s y nt heti c ’ , which provoked a public s pat with s i nger Elton John.
For most people of my parents’ generation, IVF is an unknown and, therefore, alarming.
The other reason for keeping schtum is superstition. Couples feel that if they talk about their hopes, those hopes may not come true.
and making friends with others going through the same experience can be hard.
It might seem sensible to buddy up with another patient in the clinic, to share the ups and downs, the trials of daily injections and invasive scans, but statistically only one woman in three will end up with a baby at the end of the agonising process.
How do you commiserate with your pal or continue a friendship when you’re no l onger i n the same boat?
so women in fertility clinic waiting rooms stare at their iPads as they stalk fertility forums looking for advice, rather than turning to those beside them. a warning to anyone thinking of IVF: there is something compulsive and ghoulish about those fertility forums. It’s a euphemistic world where the language of relationships is infantilised and creepy acronyms are adopted. Rather than being wished l uck, you are ‘sent babydust’, and women’s tales of miscarriage are peppered wi t h tragicomic f l ying baby emoticons. You must navigate your way through the BFNs and the BFPs (that’s big fat negative and big fat positive) and, my personal favourite, BD (baby dance — yes, that’s sexual intercourse) to try to make sense of your experience. The forums make me wish all the more that we could, as a society, talk openly and sensibly about infertility.
The women online are clearly tough: they have endured numerous arduous treatment cycles, not to mention miscarriages.
YET online they communicate in the written equivalent of baby voices. We do everyone a disservice by being coy. If we talked about it more, we’d all know that fertility treatment isn’t the preserve of the spoilt, rich or vain — it’s available on the NHs, and rightly so.
With fewer people able to buy a home in their 20s, more women working and life expectancy increasing, it’s only going to get more common for women to have children later in life.
and as mothers get older and treatment becomes more effective and cheaper, the ratio of assisted to natural conceptions will narrow.
We s hould be t eaching our daughters not just how to avoid getting pregnant, but what to do if they can’t conceive when they want to.
It would help women plan their families better if girls knew from the start about all the difficulties of a late-in-life pregnancy.
Because of the stigma still hovering over IVF, the science is moving faster than public aware- ness, and this is dangerous as well as unnecessary.
Many IVF clinics are offering ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection, where a single sperm is injected into an egg, forcing fertilisation) and PGD ( pre - i mplantation genetic diagnosis, where chromosomes of embryos created through IVF are checked for illnesses that run in the family).
But we just don’t know how safe these procedures are.
The first IVF children are only just reaching adulthood and studies into potential health risks remain inconclusive. If the public were i nformed and i nterested, they would be pushing for the NHs to fund rigorous studies and hold unscrupulous clinics to account.
There should be no shame in having an IVF baby or in undergoing the treatment. The children born of IVF are meticulously planned for and warmly welcomed, more so than any ‘Oops, the condom split’ baby.
I’m nearing the end of my third cycle. If I’m lucky enough to have a child, and to find myself in receipt of those awkward questions about reproduction that every mother is asked, I’m going to tell my child the truth about how they came to be, because they should be proud.
This article first appeared in The spectator.