Exactly. I can’t understand mourning a dog. You can’t understand mourning infertility. Let’s all just give each other the benefit of doubt and assume it’s real and meaningful to others even if it is not real and meaningful to ourselves.
Not procreating means that your genes don’t get passed on to the next generation. Therefore you are a genetic failure.
Well we had all of if which is why I find your positions so silly.
According to the Diogenes Grief/Disappointment matrix we are allowed to feel nothing over missed periods, some level of loss over miscarriage, and I think we’re allowed to feel disappointment over IVF but I’m not quite sure, there seems to be a distinction between IVF failed implantations and natural failed implantations, so we’ll have to wait for an update about what emotional reaction we’re allowed to have for each scenario.
Unfortunately our emotional experience did not fit the matrix so we will have to schedule ourselves for recalibration.
I haven’t said anything about what people are “allowed” to feel.
I guess what I (and many others) are saying is that you seem to have some sort of internal calculus that favours the one over the other - that a “loss”, whatever it may be, is deserving of sympathy, but a “frustrated desire”, however significant to the individual, is not.
This may be a sensible calculus for you, and work well. However, it is not widely shared. If you wonder why it is not widely shared, I guess the best answer is that it does not match most people’s emotional experiences. Even those who do not themselves want a baby, can analogize to some pressing desire they may reasonably have (say, to fall in love), and recognize that if they knew in advance they would never, ever fall in love, it would make them very sad, and rightly so.
Let’s take two brides.
Both of them have been engaged for a year and planning their wedding for six months. They have bought a house together with their fiance, which they plan to move into after the honeymoon. The spent a lot of time picking out furniture and fantasizing about their new life together. They have both been dreaming of that first kiss as man and wife. They both spent months planning their honeymoon in Paris, down to every last detail. In every way, they are both ready to be married and excited about their new future.
The big day comes.
The fiance of bride #1 just never shows up. A few hours later the best man finds him getting a blowjob from a hooker at a strip club. He says he never really wanted to get married, takes off, and is never heard from again.
Bride #2 takes her vows. As the couple departs for the honeymoon, her new husband slips into the restroom. He crawls out the window, runs to the airline counter, buys a ticket to Mexico and is never heard from again.
According to you, only bride #2 has a right to feel hurt, because she’s the only one whose marriage “really existed.” Bride #1, of course, is just mourning a frustrated desire. Her “marriage” never really happened, so she should just suck it up and if getting married doesn’t work she should try some alternative like moving in with her lesbian hairdresser or something. Why are all these women so stuck on getting married anyway, when there are so many lesbian hairdressers that need love, too?
Of course, that’s bullshit. Losing the opportunity for something you planned and hoped for sucks hard, and sometimes it doesn’t matter where exactly you were in the process when you learned it wasn’t going to happen.
The women who mourns her miscarriage isn’t mourning the fetus. She isn’t upset that she no longer has something in her belly kicking her and making her sick in the morning. She’s not all sad about that particular bit of flesh. She is upset about the baby that fetus would have become. She’s upset about the version of the future that she lost, the dream that got destroyed. It’s almost exactly the same as the women who never could get pregnant in the first place.
The Dioinfertility grief matrix needs to be even more specific.
What about a chemical pregnancy? A blighted ovum? Is a loss in the 14th week to be grieved over less than a loss in the 16th?
And when exactly is contempt allowed by the fertile? Is someone to be lauded if they proceed to adoption immediately after a diagnosis of infertility? What if they used clomid? How about an IUI? An IVF? More than one IVF?
Do tell.
That’s not a very strong analogy. “Marriage” is a legal contract. Both have lost relationships. One lost a piece of paper.
Let’s say they are both arranged marriages (or some male equivalent of mail-order brides, if you are going to be weird about arranged marriages), and the women have never met the fiances and do not have a pre-existing relationship with them.
For the sake of nit-picking, they are from a culture where arranged marriages are the norm, the vast majority of the people they know have entered arranged marriages, it’s the “normal” way to do things and both these women very much desire to have one and truly believe their marriage will be a good one.
Then nobody has lost anything. There never were any relationships. You can’t lose what you never had, no matter how bad you wanted it.
I wish more people would go that route rather than having their own.
There are generally enough of us wanting to be parents out there. The problem is that the parents that they want for the kids are not the ones who are applying to do the job.
So, I guess I wish there were more of us willing so that they get placed faster and with a better quality of parent.
(Seriously, what we did was not altruistic at all. You need to stop looking at it that way. We got what we wanted (a family) and all the kids got was us. Totally not a fair trade.)
I saw a picture of my baby before she was implanted - a living, fertilised embryo. I saw her being implanted. I followed the instructions from my doctor to assume I was pregnant (until proven otherwise) and to treat my body accordingly. Now I was lucky and she implanted and grew - but how would this not have been a ‘loss’ according to your definition? She existed, I saw her.
If you consider a miscarriage to be an appropriate loss, but not this, then you are applying your own arbitrary rules, and perhaps it’s not surprising that you’re seemingly out of step with the majority of posters who can see that this is something you can grieve.
Out of interest, you have repeatedly talked about family members who have dealt with infertility. Do they agree with your position that it’s no big deal, and have taken no extraordinary measures to try to procreate? If not, what are their attitudes?
If it had failed to implant, it would not have been a loss because there never would have been a pregnancy or a baby. A fertilized egg is not a baby, no matter how much you want to anthropomorphize it.
I haven’t discussed their attitides in detail. My brother in his wife have chosen not to take any measures and my sister in law adopted after trying some treatments. That’s the extent of what I know. I didn’t pry into any details. I have no interest in them.
Let’s discuss this, Dio.
A woman miscarries. What is she mourning?
I promise you, she is not mourning the physical lump of flesh and blood. She is not mourning the fetus’s personal characteristics, since fetuses generally don’t have very engaging personalities. She is probably not mourning the physical state of pregnancy, which is generally unpleasant in and of itself.
What she is mourning, is that she will not have a baby. And no, it’s not that she will not have that particular baby. One fetus is like the other. If her fetus had been magically switched with another one made from her and her partner’s genetic code she would neither know nor care. It’s not the particular bit in her stomach that she is mourning. It’s the baby it would have been to her.
Exactly the same thing a woman with infertility is mourning. If you get your hopes up, no matter where you are in the process, it’s gonna hurt to have them crushed.
Par for the course, you don’t seem to know the definition of that word either. I wasn’t’giving attribution of human characteristics to animals or non-living things, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts’ - I said that my living embryo would become a baby all things going well - and if that hadn’t happened I would have grieved for the missed chance at parenthood.
Good - then we both agree that I know more about what someone with infertility feels like, since I’ve experienced it and talked to other people who have been through it, where you have no interest and less knowledge. It hurts, you grieve, but you don’t go looking for sympathy. Instead you try to focus on other things, and count yourself lucky you have friends, family and your health instead. Not the same as someone with cancer. And since it’s clear you’re not really interested in learning more about this, so I think I’m done with this thread.
Also, at least some of the sympathy directed towards infertile couples is because quite a lot of infertility is caused by an underlying disease or condition - often very serious underlying diseases or conditions.
There are cases of infertility that nobody ever sorts out what the actual cause was - but mostly there is an actual, physical cause - and many times the cause itself is pretty awful.
My infertility is a symptom of a metabolic disease I get to treat with drugs that have obnoxious side effects for the rest of my natural life (or, yanno, run a really unacceptably high risk of dying before I ever see 45).
A disease, incidentally, which I would likely never have known about if I hadn’t sought medical care for infertility - or not found about in time to prevent my own untimely death.
Let me tell you that’s a fun surprise in your early thirties - “Oh hey, you probably won’t ever have children without major medical or legal intervention, and you’re probably going to drop dead before your 45th birthday if you don’t spend the rest of your life taking this drug which causes constant nausea (among other things)!” To be honest, I’d have preferred the cancer. Cancer generally has an end - what I have is both a life sentance and a constant reminder of the fact that I probably won’t have children of my own.
I don’t spend my time trolling for tea and sympathy, but I can certainly understand the desire to talk about it with other people having the same or similar troubles.
Dio’s sense of outrage here remains absurd and hypocritical. Many people confronting infertility opt for treatments that lead to biological children rather than deciding to adopt. Dio, like the people he finds so objectionable, did not adopt. He, too, opted for biological children. So ultimately he made same choice he condemns other people for making.
I’m not outraged, nor have I condemned anybody for making choices.
You sound both outraged and highly condemnatory in your OP:
If you’d like to argue that you no longer feel that people facing infertility are merely self absorbed whiners who should simply suck it up, never mention their feelings of hurt and/or actual physical pain as a result of a difficult medical condition and just go ahead and spend thousands of dollars adopting well that’s your option of course.