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Overcoming Infertility

A Compassionate Resource for Getting Pregnant

An Excerpt

By Robert Jansen, M.D.

The result of these changes in society from 100 years ago is that because there are more older couples, we should halve the average monthly expectation of fertility from 20 percent to about 10 percent. This gives a normal range of monthly fertility in modern industrial societies of about 1.5 to 25 percent. The expected time taken to achieve pregnancy will thus be in the range three months to four years.

The art and science of medicine exists to render the abnormal normal. That's why our societies train physicians. But who's to say where the distinction lies between normal and abnormal? If fertility is like height or weight -- with no sharp distinction between normal and abnormal -- and if we were to represent it on a graph, we are left with calling, say, the middle 90 percent of the population normal, and both the top 5 percent and the bottom 5 percent (with greatest and least fertility) abnormal. In this book we are not bothered by the top 5 percent of the population (these couples should no longer have a worry). But the bottom 5 percent, however, is surely an underrepresentation of the infertility problem. There is the perfectly understandable pressure for everyone with below average fertility to be concerned and seek treatment. The concern that can result from the allocation of resources by society is not hard to appreciate. It's the arbitrariness and a capacity for exaggerating the medical extent of infertility that troubles administrators, politicians, radical feminists and others in Western society who are critics of modern technological medical practice.

Public funding for overcoming of childlessness is under close scrutiny everywhere. The most this book can hope to contribute to the public debate is to make the facts regarding difficulties in getting pregnant more available and accessible. Meanwhile most physicians tend sympathetically to define abnormal as something troublesome enough to draw a patient into the chair on the other side of the physician's desk. To be sure, some physicians are also administrators and others are social scientists; they might argue with their patients about what's best for the community. But the doctor an infertile couple wants to see is one who puts their interests first, or who at least tells them when there are constraints that prevent this from happening. The infertility doctor and the patient become allies in securing what's wanted, which is usually a baby. This, of course, is the position I take in this book. (There is more on what to expect of your physician and how to get it in Chapter 26.)

Want to see more?

• The Infertility Marketplace: How Success Rates Are Advertised
• The Facts to Relax: Coping With the Stress of Infertility
• Truth Be Told: Uncovering Common Infertility Myths
• Talk about it!

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