Oh, you can't get pregnant, boo fucking hoo!

The BBQ Pit
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GRRRRR! I have Internet Explorer, and I just checked the home page to see if I could find a link something about the election. Instead I see that they’ve taken the election out of the top spot, and replaced it with a photo of a man and a woman looking despondently into space…like they’re standing bravely together against the looming evil of infertility. The article talks about the horrible health care systems in some states, which won’t fork out wads of money to finance fertility treatments. How can they be so cruel, to refuse to finance procedures that endanger the health of the mother and the fetus, cause birth defects, and cause multiple births? Wah wah wah!

Listen up, people: If you can’t get pregnant, maybe it’s because you’re not MEANT to be pregnant.. There are thousands and thousands of babies “given up for adoption”. There are thousands of older children in the foster care system, and the older they get, the more likely it is that they’ll reach adulthood without having a family. Forget about the damn fertility drugs! You could adopt a child in the same amount of time it would take for the treatments to bring results. Not a short time in either case, but you’d be helping someone else without endangering your health or theirs.

I love all those articles that end, “After crying themselves to sleep every night because they couldn’t produce a perfect blue-eyed blond angel like themselves, Joe and Susie have settled for adoption.” Settle this! Adoption is not something you settle for. I wonder, are these people going to tell their friends, “Yeah, we tried everything, but this is the best we could do”?

I mean no offense to anyone reading this who has undergone fertility treatments, or whose spouse has, or who has had an unsuccessful pregnancy. In fact, now that I’ve cooled down a little, it’s really the press I’m mad at; the way they make it sound like not being able to give birth is the greatest tragedy. I know there are many many people on this board who cherish their natural-born children, and I’m not denigrating that, but I just don’t see why people can’t simply accept that they’re infertile and do what people used to do: ADOPT.

Also, I know that not every fertility course results in multiple births, but AFAIK, almost every time a multiple birth does happen, it’s the result of fertility treatments.

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Not to blow my own horn–I’m no hero or saint–but my wife and I have just begun the peliminary reserch into adopting. We’re hoping to find a brother and sister, 8-12 years of age. The chance of giving these older childen a home, a family, is very satisfying, and though I know that there will be rough spots, ups and downs, moreso than with adopting an infant, I believe the rewads for us and them outweigh this.

Surely the iminent joy that is beginning to bud in us is as heartfelt and valid as any "expectant"couple’s.

Thanks for posting this topic, Rilchiam.

Sir

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You’re welcome, Sir.

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Well, up until I read this I was going to respond with an entire tirade about your stupidity in actually thinking this and ending with a hearty fuck you. However, now that I’ve read your whole post, I’ll just stick with the fuck you.

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I’ve got fertility issues. I eventually had 2 living kids without IVF or any of that stuff.

But in the event of my never carrying to term, I would not have adopted. I don’t want to be an adoptive mother. I don’t want to deal with the baggage of adoption and the involvement of professionals. I would have remained childless.

Adoption doesn’t cure infertility. It might give a couple a chance to parent but it doesn’t cure what ails them. It is not a simple fix to a problem for many many couple.

Besides I was in NZ where the average wait list for adoption is 6 years. Open adoption is mandatory (which I totally agree with). I got so fucking sick of people suggesting that I just adopt and give up on trying to breed. My chances of carrying a child to term actually were higher than my chances of adoption.

And don’t get me started on international adoption…

And Sir rhosis? I hope it all works out wonderfully for you and your new family :slight_smile:

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Primaflora, thank you very much. I will be the first to state that I (or most people, it seems to me) rarely do anything totally out of the “goodness of our hearts.” People love to share love because it makes them feel good as well. Altruism probably isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Also, I think that people must make their own decisions. If fertility treatments are your choice, I think that’s wonderful. But if not, as I said before, please, at least, consider adoption.

I would also hope that this is a topic worthy of rising above name-calling. Perhaps, IMHO would have been a better forum.

Sincerely,

Sir

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Sir Rhosis- good for you.

Onto the OP- I, like evilbeth, found your tirade a little disconcerting, but then you ended with a placating paragraph. WTF?!?

Either you believe what you stated in the first 3 paragraphs, or you meant no offence. Probably not both.

I for one can’t agree with your OP. So, you’re saying that if I can’t just “get” pregnant, then I was never meant to? So then, my best friend who has had to have 2 tough c-sections (breech births) was really meant to die in childbirth, instead of taking advantage of available medical technology? Nope, sorry.

Fuck you.

BTW, are multiple births bad? A friend just had twins and they are great. And does IVF cause birth defects? Never heard that. Endangering the health of mother and fetus? How, pray tell?

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And sorry Sir Rhosis, but based on the OP, I beleive this thread is in the right forum.

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I will never bear children. I am infertile. Luckily, before finding this out, I had already made the decision that I would adopt rather than produce my own children. I refuse to contribute to the over-population of this world. I refuse to hasten the lowering of the standard of living that has already begun to decline.

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Rilchiam, I partially agree with your message, but I have to say you, personally, are a stupid, ignorant fuck.
A primal urge of humanity is to reproduce. A fundamental example of human progress is medical advances to fix problems with the human body. I’m nearsighted. A logical extension of your “If you can’t get pregnant, maybe it’s because you’re not MEANT to be pregnant” sentiment is that I’m not supposed to see, so I shouldn’t wear glasses (or, in my case have had LASIK surgery). There’s a word for people like you - Luddites. Most people don’t accept the Luddite philosophy, for good reason.
I personally agree that couples who spend thousands on fertility treatments that are improbable to succeed are misguided. I don’t agree that people who take advantage of fertility treatments that have decent to good success rates are also misguided. They have a medical problem and are working to fix it.
As for your blithe “just adopt” sentiment, you either haven’t thought this through, or have an unrealistically high opinion of human nature. It is hard to have true maternal/paternal feelings towards someone who is not your biological child. People like Sir Rhosis are to be admired, particularly for wanting to adopt older children, where the process is even harder.
If you don’t believe me, read the recent study in which it was uncovered that non-biological children (including adoptees) generally do worse in education, nutrition, and medical care than biological children. I don’t have the cite, but it has been widely reported, so you should be able to find it easily.
Your message is not far off - in at least an ideal world, people shouldn’t focus on fertility treatments to the detriment of the thousands of kids awaiting adoption. I probably also agree that fertility treatments should be at the cost of the couple, not the insurance companies. However, your attitude, that people who want to have their own biological children are whining crybabies, is disgusting, offensive, and amazingly fuckwad-like.
Sua

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There are several problems with adoption:

  1. The waiting list, which has already been discussed.

  2. A lot of people who want to adopt want a healthy, white baby, and those aren’t exactly thick on the ground. A lot of people don’t want a minority baby, or one which was abandoned and whose parentage and family medical history is unknown. Very few people want a crack baby, or a baby who has learning disabilites.

  3. After adopting a baby, the new parents may have the baby for years, fall in love with it, and suddenly be slapped with a custody suit when the birth mother pops back into the picture. It’s not unknown for a birth mother to regain custody years later. You would always have the worry in the back of your mind that the baby could be taken from you.

Surrogate mothers are another problem. A couple I know decided to try this option, and found a young woman who wanted to give her baby up. They paid her medical expenses and all of her living expenses in anticipation that once the baby was born it would be theirs. At the last moment, the young woman changed her mind, and kept the baby. They found another surrogate, and she did the exact same thing. They’re out of thousands upon thousands of dollars, and now they can’t afford, either financially or emotionally to do it all over again. Had they actaully gotten the baby, they still would have had to worry that the birth mother might try to regain custody in the future.

Understand that some people feel that their purpose in life is to have a family, and they feel that something is missing from their lives without a child. Although I’ve decided never to have children, I can understand the pain they feel and their willingness to try anything to get what they so desperately want.

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OK, let me try and keep this simple.

Rilchiam, it is I, Coldfire. I mean you no harm.

Having said that: You can’t be THAT dumb. You HAD to know that an OP like that would raise a eyebrows. I don’t know what the exact details of EvilBeths fertility situation are, but if I can take a wild guess, her reaction is spot-on.

Care to explain yourself on this one? It is entirely unlike you. And don’t get me wrong: I’m all for adoption.

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Most unusual comment from you Rilchiam,

Unnecassarily cruel too.

True we cannot all get what we want, true we should not expect children as a right but should be joyful on the occasions that we do.

If you were to have any illness that required medical intervention you would expect to recieve it and even if it were hopeless you would not stop looking without making absolutely sure that this was the case.

Why support the denial of that right to another?

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I wish your post had been rewritten to focus the attack on the way the media talks about this issue–you got to this at the end. Perhaps it should have led the rant. They do overromanticize and overdramatize things, especially around this issue, and it does no one any good.

On a larger level, the media follows this same pattern with a lot of medical issues–espcially those that involve children. In women’s magazines I often see stories about kids (especially babies) with daunting medical problems but the parents “refused to believe” that the kid wouldn’t heal up fine. Hey! What do you know, the kid IS fine in the end. Sure, that happens sometimes. But no one is running the stories with the other outcomes. When it doesn’t work out. Did those parents not “hope” enough, then? Did they not pray enough? Were they too accepting of medical fact? Argh! I suppose the object is to offer up a “feel good” story, but the result is that the media provides a very one-sided and unrealistic view of health issues–and alters the societal expectation of how families are supposed to react.

Back to the OP. I would never presume to know how much pain infertility causes some couples, nor would I be able to say that I could determine what is the right decision for them. But in their shoes, I’d resent the implication that one is always supposed to react with a certain degree of wrenching agony, of feeling unfulfilled, etc. I might feel that way. I might not. It might vary from one day to the next. Stop the goddman violin music and let me decide.

This sort of thing starts seeming really scripted, and that’s what is so offensive to me (or would be, if I were facing the same problem). There’s a script for how you face a serious illness in your child, a script for how you deal with infertility, there’s a script for how you’re supposed to bond with your baby when you DO get it. Agh, yack, and ralph.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by SuaSponte *
Rilchiam, I partially agree with your message, but I have to say you, personally, are a stupid, ignorant fuck.

Hmmmm. Is gratuitous name-calling a requirement of posting in the Pit? That wasn’t necessary. Consider yourself chided.

Have to agree with most of the rest of your post though.

Not so sure about the “primal urge” to reproduce argument. Many people who like to fuck don’t want kids, and many who want kids don’t necessarily like sex. Which urge is primal? Sex or reproduction?

And we sure don’t need drug companies and the media helping to propagate the myth that a woman isn’t complete or a family isn’t a family unless they have natural-born children.

Your analogy about child-bearing and nearsightedness isn’t all that “logical.”

Hypothetical:

I’m extremely nearsighted.

Option #1. I get glasses to correct my vision.

Option #2: Glasses are cumbersome. I look better without them. I’m holding out for the surgery. I can’t afford it, and the insurance company won’t cover it, but I’d rather walk around blind than wear glasses.

I can’t get pregnant.

Option #1: Adopt. I’ll have to prove my worthiness as a parent, and I may not get exactly what I want, but I’m not guaranteed to get what I want through my own pregnancy either. The important thing is that I have love and attention that I want to give to a child.

Option #2: Expensive, time-consuming, emotionally-draining fertility treatments. Sure, it’ll take time, and money, and medical resources, it may not work, and it may result in multiple births, or a baby with medical problems, but it will be my baby. That’s what’s important.

Rilchiam’s not all wrong here, in my opinion.

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Rilchiam, I would still love to hear you expand on the statements you made in the OP about multiple births being bad, and IVF endangering the health of mother & fetus and causing birth defects.

There are some things about IVF that you can criticise. Expensive? Absolutely. Painful? Hell yes, from what I’ve heard. But the statements you made need some explanation, I think.

And I think that the topic of choosing adoption deserves it’s own thread in another forum, separate from the original idea set forth in this one.

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If people were meant to survive Cancer they’d do so. Why waste billions of Dollars trying to cure this disease? The world is overpopulated already. Boo-hoo. You should just let our disease run its course. All these selfish people demanding innoculations and treatments. Why don’t they just die? Plenty of other healthy could use the air and the food.

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Why do people push abortion so hard whenever there’s such a waiting list for adoptions? Why don’t people encourage mothers to have the baby and put it up for adoption? All 3 win. No aborter’s guilt, the baby gets a life, and the adopter gets a child.

–Tim

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TANGENT

Yeah. It’s something of a biological imperative, sometimes tossed in with that whole “propogation of the species” thing. Considering that, generally speaking, your only purpose in life (from a biological point of view) is reproduction.

Of course, the fact that there are already 6 billion people on the planet suggests that we’ve propogated rather well.

Maybe the ad campaign for the new century, instead of “Safe Sex”, should be “Responsible Reproduction”.

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Speaking as a woman who is infertile as a result of a mismanaged delivery (I contracted an infection in my uterus during delivery; the baby died, and I most likely can’t have another), I can see all sides of this issue.

I do agree with the OP that there is quite a bit of kvetching on the part of infertile couples who do go the medical route. These treatments are expensive, not covered by insurance, painful as hell, and not guaranteed to work. I’ve talked with a number of women who have had this done, and there is a lot of heartbreak associated with going through all that discomfort and expense, and still not being able to get pregnant.

There is a thread started on the adoption issue.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=44617 if you’re interested. Again, I’ve talked to several family members who have gone this route (including my own parents, who are fighting the Texas social services bureaucracy to adopt an older child), and that’s not perfect either. Beyond the social workers and the background checks and the homestudies, and all the “professional” help, there is, at the end, a child.

So, for the moment, my decision is to try to adopt a healthy, white baby. If this seems racist or closed-minded, well, so be it. I’m not making apologies for that.

Oh, and BTW, I’m also repulsed beyond belief by all those heartwarming stories of children beating the odds against horrible diseases. Reader’s Digest and the like can come interview ME for the less than happy ending.

Robin