Why women will NEVER talk about not being able to get pregnant with ease

About sixteen percent of couples between 20-43 struggle with infertility. If you are older then 35, your chances rise to about 1:3 that you will experience delays in getting pregnant.

Over twenty percent of pregnancies of women over 35 end in miscarriage due to diminished egg quality.

How many women calculate for this time when they plan to get pregnant after 35?

I certainly didn’t calculate with it and when I was said with 35 (only a several months prior to my wedding) that I have almost no eggs left, I went through one of the emotionally worst times of my life.

On the top, about twenty percent of pregnancies are diagnosed with complications of some kind. Which I personally find to be a way to exaggerated and HATE to hear about women having C-sections only because they are over 35, or for any other convenient reason away from medical and physiological reality.

Still, this is how pregnancies and births are treated today and it will take time until these established habits change.

There is a tendency in our culture to romanticize pregnancies and sweet little babies, and be silent about the rest. In spite of social media being flooded with intimate details from ultrasound images of fetuses and reports how it feels to be pregnant, there is a still caution around revealing the full, and sometimes painful, experience of becoming pregnant after 35.

Many people believe things are changing and there is a shift in how we talk about infertility (here you can contact me if you need my advice). Especially in high-tech countries like Canada and US, where women have access to reproductive technologies and a possibility to blog about it, there is a flood of information about all the details surrounding the fertility treatments.

Still, I am skeptical about IVF ever really coming out of being a taboo and women ever talking about not being able to get pregnant with ease.

I  doubt that women will ever feel confident to tell about IVF in their circles of friends and co-workers.

Why?

IVF is not a heart disease. It’s not a bipolar disorder. It’s not a HIV.

What do i mean by that? That ALL diseases which evoke empathy are about having something. Having an anomaly. Having a wrong gene. Having a fucking virus.

Infertility is all about not having something. Not having a baby. Not having that life inside of you. Not being capable of having something that everyone else seems to have.

Human brain is bad in dealing with vain and with absence. It rather puts them on “ignore” and deals with immediate problems.

This I know from the years I’ve spent in scientific laboratories: you must at least have a phenomenon or an observation in order to build experiments around it. There is no way to experimentally aproach or logically deal with an absent issue.

Human mind needs something to grasp to.

That’s why we will continue seeing a flood of reports on every detail accompanying IVF, but the real issue behind it, infertility and not being able to get pregnant inspite of trying, women will always keep for themselves.

Because infertility equals pain. And how do you describe pain?

Not discussing is the only way to protect yourself from it.

You don’t believe me? Go ahead and try telling everyone you can’t get pregnant. People can’t feel anything, their minds can’t deal with absence of your baby. Instead of true human empathy, you will get to hear stuff like: “Maybe you should just relax and it will happen”, “Maybe it’s not meant to be”, or happy-end stories like “My sister in law couldn’t get pregnant, but now she has twins and is developing a fertility app“.

No one feels good after that kind of conversation.

Don’t get me wrong. I do support women talking to each other and here is the most awesome list of fertility blogs where you can find a whole lot of awesome information.

I only want to say, the essence of infertility is unspeakable, that’s why we will continue to be silent about it inspite of exploding number of fertility-related websites.

Motherhood has always been seen as the most vital part in a woman’s life and the inability to fulfill that role is perceived as a failure. The three-month code of silence around a pregnancy is meant to protect women from the pain and awkwardness of discussing a miscarriage, and the years of silence while coping with infertility are meant to protect women from the pain and awkwardness of not being able to get pregnant.

Which would finally mean that silence is a good and protective shield against pain, right?