‘Our son was eight years in the making’: 11 women on getting through the marathon of infertility
When Monique Farook finally let go of what had been her secret shame, her mother’s response was fast and painfully plain: “Infertility? What is that?”
Those were her exact words, recalled Farook, who spent six months trying to get pregnant, then almost four years trying to convince her husband that in vitro fertilization (IVF) or some other assisted reproductive technology was the way to go. After one failed intrauterine insemination (IUI), where sperm is injected into the uterus, and a successful round of IVF, where an embryo is implanted, Farook finally gave birth to her son, now six-year-old Omar.
“I spent years suffering in silence, crying alone in the bathroom or sitting in my car,” said Farook, a 40-year-old real estate investor in Frederick, Maryland. “This kind of thing didn’t happen in my family. My sister had multiple, healthy births. I didn’t want to be the anomaly.”
The Guardian spoke to Farook and 10 other Black mothers who shared the ups and downs of their medically assisted paths to parenthood. A small but growing number of Black women in the US are choosing medical interventions, including surrogacy, to have children, and the subjects in this feature said they want to strip away the relative silence surrounding Black infertility.
Their testimonies shine a light on what can be a heartrending yet beautiful journey. They also show some of the deep inadequacies of fertility treatments and the US medical system.
“Telling the story is liberating,” said the Rev Dr Stacey Edwards-Dunn, a Chicago minister and the founder of Fertility for Colored Girls, a national group that provides grants to help individuals pay for fertility treatments. “It opens you up: the child may come through adoption, donor eggs, donor sperm, donor embryos. None of those paths are deficient; they’re just different. But telling the story frees us up to carve out space to embrace the gift that comes.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
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‘We sold our home to pay her surrogacy fees’
Gabrielle Davis, 41 |FloridaA donor egg and a surrogateOne son, Antione “AJ” Jr, four
On Valentine’s Day 2009, when I was 26, my first lupus flare put me in intensive care for four days. The doctor said: “You may want to have a child as soon as possible.” But my husband and I wanted to wait until we felt ready, including financially, to try.
By the time we were ready, my kidneys were functioning at 4% of their capacity. I was on dialysis, but we still tried to get pregnant. You can call that faith, foolishness, determination or desperation to defy the odds against us. In the last of many appointments at a local fertility clinic, we faced reality. The nurses and doctors didn’t coddle me: I had no more eggs and wouldn’t be making any more. Lupus also attacks the reproductive system.
The woman who graciously became our surrogate had been offered up for duty by her husband, a friend of my husband’s, hastily and without her knowledge. Yet, over dinner with us, she agreed. We sold our home to pay her surrogacy fees. It’s hard to wrap your head and heart around another woman carrying your child, getting all the attention. I’ve done a lot of therapy to let my son and myself know that, while we are not connected biologically, we are spiritually bound.
I had to shift my perspective. I had to focus on how God went out of His way for us. There are sisters with lupus who gave birth naturally, then died. I try to show women that there are other routes to take.
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‘He treated me like a number’ Cherí Michelle Rushing, 41 | NevadaFour rounds of IVFA son, Ethan, six, and a daughter, Capri, 14 weeks
“I wish I’d known about the mental toll it takes when someone tells you you’re infertile and that IVF is your only option – or leaves you in the waiting room for an hour, as our initial infertility doctor did during our consultation. He treated me like a number, not a patient needing some compassion and gentle care.
When my husband and I finally came up with the money for IVF, the first cycle failed. The second cycle was worse. Though that doctor promised not to over-stimulate my ovaries, causing them to make way too many eggs and causing me a lot of physical pain, he did. We realized that he wasn’t a good fit for us and that we have the right to move around, to ask questions.
We tried a second doctor, then a third, a Black woman who discovered that I had uterine polyps and that my lining was too thick. She made us aware of important tests that others did not, testing our embryos to see if they had any defects. She was very attentive and listened to every one of our concerns. She also was OK with doing things my way, on my timetable.”
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‘She looked me straight in the eye and said: “This is fixable”’
Regina Townsend, 42 | IllinoisOne round of IVFOne son, Judah Emmanuel, seven
My husband and I tried to get pregnant when I was 24, thinking it would be a cakewalk. I’d never made the connection between my fertility and these ridiculously long periods I was having, sometimes lasting two months. Occasionally I’d wind up in the ER – because I didn’t have health insurance at the time – where I’d have to sit and wait for somebody to see me. All they kept telling me was: “Lose weight,” or “Here’s some birth control pills.”
Eventually, one doctor gave me the drug Clomid, without explaining that it’s supposed to induce ovulation. Next, she gave me Metformin, a drug I knew was used to treat diabetes. With both medications, nothing positive happened. A fertility specialist read a blog I’d started about my journey and reached out; he suspected I had polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal imbalance. But my doctor was like: “It’s not PCOS because you don’t have any ovarian cysts.”
I left that physician for a different doctor who told me: “If you think it’s PCOS, let’s look into that. You know your body. PCOS presents in different ways in different people.” She also tested my tubes for blockages, and none of the dye moved through them. I was dejected because it meant the next step was going to be IVF. But she looked me straight in the eye and said: “This is fixable.”
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‘That diagnosis took me to a breaking point’
Summer Bey, 39 |CaliforniaOne round of IVFOne daughter, Aïda, four
Almost four years into trying to get pregnant, I’d already had an operation to get rid of uterine polyps and a second procedure to check whether my fallopian tubes were open enough to let eggs travel down and sperm travel up. Neither procedure helped me conceive. So, out of curiosity, I asked for my medical records. “Infertile” was stamped across the file – my medical team never said that word to me.
That diagnosis took me to a breaking point. It shattered my hope of getting pregnant on my own, but it also made me take the wheel. I changed to an insurance plan that covered fertility treatments. The fertility clinic I chose welcomed me and my partner warmly and clarified my infertility diagnosis. The doctor said: “You have endometriosis,” which had done damage to my fallopian tubes.
We did a round of IVF and threw one of those bad boy embryos up in there. Because I was a high-risk pregnancy, they stitched my cervix to hold the baby inside. I was on bed rest for a while, which took a toll on me, my marriage and my now ex-husband. My daughter is such a huge blessing, but looking back on all of it, I wish there would have been more in-depth conversations about my womb health before I came asking for help at 30.
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‘My uterus banana’
Rev Dr Stacey Edwards-Dunn, 53 | IllinoisSeven rounds of IVFDaughters Shiloh, nine, and Saige and Selah, two
Our first specialist told me that my infertility was unexplained and that IVF was going to cost $25,000. (My husband and I wound up spending $100,000 over the years.) After much prayer and some research, we went to Barbados where the cost [for treatment] was $7,000. But our first two procedures failed.
We came back to Chicago and tried a different fertility clinic, where I also didn’t get pregnant through IVF, even though they said I had a multitude of very good eggs. So, I changed doctors again. I wound up with a woman who approached this work holistically and personalized my treatment, because I also was diagnosed with lupus around this time. After doing a whole battery of tests on me, she pointed out a couple of problems that absolutely no doctor, over a period of five years of pre-testing and testing, had mentioned: my uterus is shaped like a banana and I have only one fallopian tube.
If I had to do it all over again, in addition to asking more questions from the outset of fertility treatment, I’d also ask to see pictures of the inside of my body. One of the things that could have been happening is that every time those previous doctors transferred my embryos into me, they were putting them in the wrong place. What that last
is shaped like a
fertility specialist did was game-changing. It moved us forward.
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‘IVF is a bear’ Loree Johnson, 49 |CaliforniaFive rounds of IVFOne son, Soso, two
My first pregnancy by natural means ended in miscarriage; my second natural pregnancy ended in a termination for medical reasons. I coped with my deep depression through therapy and what I call my grief tour: Italy, Cuba, Seychelles, Greece, Morocco, Kenya. While traveling, I decided to do IVF.
When you’re over 40 and are closer to menopause, you don’t respond to fertility medications as readily. My first round of IVF resulted in a failed embryo transfer and no pregnancy. Later on, another transfer resulted in what’s called a chemical pregnancy, which is an extremely early loss. By then, I was 43.
I took some needed emotional space and, at 45, revisited things, as I still had two frozen embryos. Our son was eight years in the making and he’s beautiful, but IVF is a bear. Being on a table, poked and prodded, creates a physical, mental, financial and social exhaustion that we don’t adequately explore. Our society tells women: “You can have it all.” That is part of the misinformation. A dear friend was 38, getting married and planning for a baby when she found out that she was in premature ovarian failure. It made me change my own messaging: “Freeze your eggs.”
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‘I went into denial’ Latazia Stuart, 46 |FloridaSix rounds of IVFOne daughter, Jazz, 10; twin sons, Dre and Al, eight
In my 20s, I had surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. Afterward, my gynecologist said: “You don’t want to put off getting pregnant for much longer.” I dismissed it. My husband and I were just getting started with our lives, building our careers. We had time.
When we finally started trying to make a baby, my monthly cycles kept coming like clockwork. A different doctor did exploratory surgery to find that I had a huge web of scar tissue on