My husband and I had infertility struggles. Basically, he had less than 2 million in a sample and ALL were deformed. My tests came back normal.
We were public with our IVF results, which weren’t great. We underwent two sessions of IVF and I only ended up with one embryo who developed into my amazing son.
Yesterday, while I was at work, one of my co-workers approached me and said, “You know, there’s lots of women who thought they couldn’t get pregnant but then got pregnant!”
I just stared right at her and went, “I can get pregnant.”
After an awkward pause, she went: “I don’t know why I assumed you couldn’t.”
“Well, I mean, I did become pregnant via an embryo. I was pregnant, i had my son.”
But this rhetoric has been very common to me.
I’ve had people give me advice: “Just go on birth control and then get off birth control! That’ll make you pregnant!”
I had another co-worker tell me she’d happily be a surrogate for me.
Like, she seen me pregnant???
I understand people really don’t understand why we’re choosing to only to have one child. (The emotional and financial toll of IVF really hurt us.) But in the 10 years of us having unprotected intercourse, we never conceived naturally! The only time we were successful is when an embryo (that had to have his sperm injected directly into it to be successful), was placed by doctors into me.
Fertility issues are half and half! Which makes sense. Why would it only be women who are infertile??
Now, this is an issue that has bothered me silently but its one I cannot really discuss. I don’t want to throw my man under the bus here. Infertility wasn’t his fault. He’s a healthy, normal guy. We don’t know why his results were dismal.
I wanted to go public to alert people to the difficulties of IVF. But it really does seem like the general consensus is that it must be the women’s fault!
Anyway, is it sexism? Is it that the idea of males being infertile is so taboo, people default to it? Is it just that I was the public one?