Norine Dworkin-McDaniel
October 18, 2011
Source: REDBOOK
Infertility can be devastating, and it’s time we openly acknowledged that. “You walk around with this feeling of a missing piece,” says Paige Nolt, 29, in the video she posted for REDBOOK’s “The Truth About Trying” campaign.
There’s nothing the tabloids love more than a baby reveal. And lately, many of the celebs cradling adorable downy-haired infants are 40-somethings. We hear about their designer nurseries, the mini couture outfits, and how they chose their exotic names, but we rarely hear about the fertility issues they endured. Going by the statistics, some certainly did: By age 40, a woman has only a 5 percent chance of conceiving during each cycle. “Regardless of how well you take care of yourself, ovaries age at a constant rate, and there’s nothing you can do to halt it. That clock ticks on,” says Robert Gustofson, M.D., medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Denver. “By 45, the chance of having a child with your own eggs is 1 percent.”
Along with celebs, millions of unfamous women keep their baby-making challenges under wraps. Everyone has the right to privacy, of course, but that secrecy has left so many women to cope alone, in pain, and often uninformed. “It’s frustrating that our society is not more open about infertility,” says Barbara Collura, executive director of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association. “When women dealing with infertility can communicate with others in their situation, they get through it in a much better state of mind and also share needed information about their options.”
Those are some of the key reasons REDBOOK has joined forces with RESOLVE to launch “The Truth About Trying,” an online video campaign to start an open conversation about infertility, which strikes one in eight women in the United States. The message of those speaking out: It’s not always easy to get pregnant, and there’s no shame in that.
“It’s crazy to me that this topic is still taboo,” says participant Rosie Pope, 31, who talks about her battle to become a second-time mom — and her shock at all the denial out there — in her video. The star of Bravo’s Pregnant in Heels says, “A lot of people who have gone through IVF and managed to have kids shove it under the rug and pretend it never happened. In Hollywood, you can talk about your drug addiction or divorce, but not infertility. It’s a real disservice to women.”
Most of the fertility specialists and support-group leaders REDBOOK spoke with confirm that couples often conceal their fertility problems. Even when they find a community online, the exchanges are largely anonymous; in real life, they are typically silent. Indeed, in a survey of couples having difficulty conceiving, conducted by the pharmaceutical company Merck, 61 percent of respondents hid their infertility from family and friends. Nearly half didn’t even tell their mothers.
It’s time for infertility to come out of the closet. In their “Truth About Trying” videos, women put names, faces, and voices to this disease (yes, it’s a disease). They are raw, brave, helpful, and warm, and together they offer a powerful resource for you or a friend, sister, daughter — anyone coping with infertility.
What we’re not saying (and hearing)
The official definition of infertility: an inability to get or stay pregnant after a year of trying if you’re under 35, or six months if you’re older. Twelve percent of reproductive-age American women — about 7.3 million — are having trouble conceiving or carrying a baby to term, up from about 9 percent in 1988, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some of that rise reflects the fact that more people are waiting longer to start families, and the older you are, the more likely it is that you’ll have issues like early menopause or a risk of miscarriage. Some 7 to 10 percent of men are infertile; in about 20 percent of situations, both partners have problems. And anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of infertility is “unexplained,” as in, there’s no medical answer for why you’re not pregnant, except that you’re not. “I work out every day. I just did a triathlon. You think, If I’m healthy, this will happen,” says Lori LeRoy, 39, of Indianapolis, who began trying to conceive naturally at 33. She went on to do in vitro fertilization (IVF), and now she and her husband are in the midst of adopting a little boy.
A quick refresher course: With IVF, egg and sperm meet in a petri dish, then embryos are placed in the uterus, helping the process along. While the procedure improves on the 20 percent chance of pregnancy women have when their fertility is at its peak, the success rates drop steeply with age. For women under 35, the odds of carrying a baby to term are 41 percent per IVF cycle. At 38, the chance of birth is 22 percent; at 41, 12 percent; and at 43, 5 percent — slender odds that don’t come cheap, given that most couples pay for treatment out of pocket. “When we started getting the bills, I thought, If only I’d started sooner, I could’ve put the money toward my kids’ college tuition,” says Angelique Jones, 41, of Thorndale, PA, now pregnant with twins.
Lori and Angelique are open about their experiences but acknowledge they were unusually forthcoming. One reason infertility is considered hush-hush is that it’s wrapped up in sex, a subject Americans are notoriously squirmy about. “If you start discussing infertility, you have to talk about ovaries and semen and all kinds of things you don’t usually discuss over dinner,” says Paige Nolt, 29, of Charlottesville, VA, who’s been trying to get pregnant for two years. “Just dealing with my own emotions was difficult enough, so I didn’t talk about it at all.”
Many women dread hearing what family and friends might say, which is why 43 percent of 549 people surveyed by RESOLVE stayed quiet. “I didn’t want people putting pressure on me; I already felt like a failure,” says Fran Meadows, 38, of Queens, NY. “I’d grin through baby showers, then cry my eyes out afterward.”
The keep-it-on-the-down-low mentality only perpetuates more secrecy, says Sharon Covington, director of psychological support services at Shady Grove Fertility Center in Washington, DC. “Women think there’s something wrong with them while the rest of society has no problem getting pregnant.”
That sense of being defective can be even stronger among women of “advanced maternal age” — those over 35. “I felt I couldn’t do this thing women are supposed to do,” says Anna Maynard, 43, of Manassas, VA, who tried to conceive naturally for a year before opting for egg donation. “I thought maybe I shouldn’t have moved around so much for jobs, and tried to meet someone earlier to settle down with. I was angry at myself for waiting too long and wasting my fertile years, and jealous of the young girl who had plenty of eggs while I was like a beggar at her door.”
The benefits of opening up
Paige Nolt suffered in silence for months. “I was overwhelmed by the loss of the family my husband and I envisioned,” she says. “One day, coworkers were all cracking up about something that had happened in the office. They looked at me and I was the only one not laughing. I came home and told my husband I couldn’t be a victim anymore, so I started an infertility support group.” Paige also appears in a “Truth About Trying” video. “It’s a hard issue to talk about, but it would have been so great if someone had told me early on, ‘I know exactly what you’re going through because I went through it too.'”
Women who put their infertility out there often find instant connections — and comfort. “I felt like I was alone,” says 36-year-old Anika Palm, of Orlando, FL, in her video. “To my surprise, after I was open about it, people came to me and told me their experiences.” When Keiko Zoll, 29, of Salem, MA, announced she was infertile on a Facebook update during National Infertility Awareness Week in the spring of 2009, “I immediately received emails from three friends admitting they were facing similar issues,” she says. “We gave up our anonymity for something better: mutual understanding and hope.”
More openness could also help families afford help. Only seven states require insurers to cover at least part of infertility treatment. “It’s still beyond the means of most Americans,” says Alice Domar, Ph.D., executive director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health at Boston IVF. “We need to create a lot of noise to get more coverage.”
Speak out to support other women and yourself, says Carla Corbitt, 28, of Beaverton, OR. “I’m proud that I can look back on my journey to motherhood and know that not only did it strengthen my marriage and make me more resilient as an individual, but I was also able to give hope to others,” she says in her video. “I wish I had sat down a long time ago and started the conversation. I’m just glad that I eventually realized that infertility is not my fault.”
The latest fertility breakthrough
Breast exam, pap smear, banking your eggs: A new fertility technology called vitrification could become standard medical procedure in coming years. It allows women to flash-freeze their eggs so they can implant them in their wombs years or even decades later. Unlike conventional slow-freezing, which often led to the formation of ice crystals in the eggs, this high-speed method greatly improves success rates.
So, will women in their 20s or early 30s rush to put their eggs on ice? Not in the near future, thanks to the $10,000 to $15,000 price tag. And the procedure — which includes daily hormone shots for two weeks to stimulate egg production, followed by egg-retrieval surgery — isn’t fail-safe: “Freezing a batch of eggs when you’re 30 gives you a 60 percent chance of a baby,” says Jamie Grifo, M.D., Ph.D., director of NYU Fertility Center’s division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility. “That means there’s a 40 percent chance you don’t get pregnant.”
Costs should come down over time, and the odds may well improve. Ultimately, whether you bank your eggs as a hedge against potential infertility really depends on your life plans, says Erika B. Johnston-MacAnanny, M.D., assistant professor of reproductive medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC. “I wouldn’t offer this to every 20-year-old who walks into my office. But if a young woman has absolutely no intention of getting pregnant until she’s 40, I’d be comfortable providing egg freezing. I’d want her to know her options.”
CELEBS BREAK THE SILENCE
Marissa Jaret Winokur, 38, Rosie Pope, 31, Sherri Shepherd, 44, and Padma Lakshmi, 41, are among the stars sharing personal stories of infertility in the “Truth About Trying” video campaign sponsored by REDBOOK and RESOLVE. “Telling a woman who’s struggling, ‘It took me four tries to get pregnant’ can give her hope,” says Winokur, who’s had one child via a surrogate. See all of the videos at redbookmag.com/truthabouttrying.
Read more: Dealing With Infertility – Trying to Get Pregnant – Redbook
