Infertility
I grew up in the midst of the paradigm-busting, revolutionary, and evolutionary generation of women who realized they had a choice in their life- that of whether to leave school and start a family, further their education and establish a career or to do both. Or did we really have that choice? Many women who pursued the path of higher education and career were unduly influenced by a culture that elevates an individual to ‘you are deemed worthy’ status if you are involved in whatever the culture sees as important at the time. Most women making that life-altering decision are young, easily influenced and lack the ability to fashion an identity or self that goes beyond one’s family and culture. So by the time women figure this out and have established their sense of self and have identified with what their true desires are, they are in their late thirties and forties. These women are brought face to face with the inheritance of their generation, that being, ‘My career is established, I want to experience the nurturer within me,
1
I would like to have a child now and I am running against the reproductive time clock’. For years they have assumed responsibility for their procreation from a conscious choice. They choose not just to have a child because it is all they can do, to fill up an empty void in their life or to keep a man. They felt empowered to have the choice to have a child when it was right for them. Or so they thought. When a woman finds she is at the end of her reproductive years and that she is unable to conceive a child, despair and a sense of injustice is her emotional response. She feels that her instinctive birthright that comes with being a woman has been taken from her. Because many women of our generation have chosen to wait "for the right time", many have found themselves faced with infertility. The trauma of infertility is emotionally difficult for most women.
The mind/body connection in infertility has been virtually abandoned as our society has become more technologically focused and treatment naturally centers on the latest high-tech surgeries, processes and hormone treatments. Several studies though have shown psychological factors also contribute to a woman’s fertility. One prevalent psychological factor contributing to a woman’s infertility is that it is not what the woman truly wants in her heart. She is afraid of the demands a child will make on her already-demanded-upon life. If a woman is directing all her energy maintaining a successful career and keeping her life going, then there is very little energy left in her body to conceive a child. Her body is taking on the responsibility she consciously refuses to do by providing the birth control needed. This may come in the form of short luteal2
