Archive for the ‘Infertility on Television’ Category
Why is miscarriage shrouded in secrecy?
January 18, 2011 | By: Elizabeth
I’ve said it before and I cannot believe I am saying it again. Why is having a miscarriage something people pretend never happened? Or worse, why are people judged so harshly after having had a miscarriage for not embracing any subsequent pregnancy and being a little bit cautious and tentative about the whole thing?
Yesterday I read an article on some random website announcing that a celebrity had just announced she was pregnant. The article was extremely critical of the fact that she had waited until the 6th month to announce her pregnancy, and commented that it may have been due to the fact that she had suffered a prior miscarriage. It then went on to discuss all sorts of celebrity pregnancy issues. But it was about the third article I have seen recently commenting on a celebrity’s miscarriage. None of the articles were supportive, not even for the one celebrity that was openly going through fertility treatment and then lost a baby. Any miscarriage at any time in pregnancy is awful. As many of you know my final infertility diagnosis was unexplained pregnancy loss (which has since been explained). I had 5 IVF miscarriages (including a pregnancy that started as twins), and I don’t want to tell you how many more I have had on top of that because at some point you just have to stop counting and cope. I have blogged about at least one of them.
I have always been open about my miscarriages and my pregnancies. I am one of those “put it out there” kind of people. But a lot of people choose not to share early pregnancies. They instead choose to wait to make an announcement when they are sure that the pregnancy is viable or the fetus is otherwise healthy. Everyone does it their own way. And as this is a very personal subject, I was offended that this article “accused” this celebrity of failing to disclose her pregnancy earlier. MYOB!
Miscarriage is poorly understood on so many levels. I will blog about the medical aspects later, but for today let’s address the emotional component. I may have blogged about this before but someone recently commented to me that 20 years ago no one even talked about this. My grandmother’s generation suffered in complete silence, often not even sharing the loss of a pregnancy with their spouse!! The fact that we are beginning to talk openly about miscarriage is a huge leap forward.
Did you know that among the fertile population only 20% of all conceptions result in a live birth? That number decreases with age. With so many women choosing to build their families later in life, whether they conceive on their own or with some form of medical assistance, their chances of experiencing a pregnancy loss are much higher. Doctor’s often warn patients who are over 35 not to get excited about a pregnancy until they see a heartbeat on ultrasound because the risk of miscarriage is so high. NOvary™ or not, miscarriage is devastating.
If you ask me, all these women need support, information, and the ability to discuss their grief in whatever manner is most appropriate for them and to do so without criticism! But the fact remains that most people still won’t even admit they had a miscarriage. The entire first trimester of pregnancy is shrouded in secrecy and thus any resulting miscarriage is as well. It is not a personal failure to lose a baby. It is an overwhelming emotional experience whether you are six weeks or six months pregnant. I think people should be able to talk about miscarriage — I think people need to be better educated about pregnancy loss but as noted that is a subject for a different blog post — and not have it be considered something shameful or even worse, “no skin off your nose dear, you were only 7 weeks pregnant, get over it”.
Is it the fear of being shamed that causes us to hide our miscarriages as was true for my grandmother and her generation? Is it the need for privacy and the accompanying silence during the first trimester that causes the secrecy? Or is it the fear of the “just get over it” response that people don’t discuss this topic?
Well, I am going to discuss this topic. I think I have enough experience to have some insight into the emotional aspects of pregnancy loss and I’ve done a ton of research on the topic, both for The Infertility Survival Handbook, my own personal curiosity and now for the revised and updated version of my book.
My final comment of the day is this. Whether we choose to grieve in silence or in public, please don’t attack us for our choice in so doing; you need to understand that it is a tremendous blow to every woman (not to mention her partner) who experiences a pregnancy loss. If you know someone who has shared this information with you, BE SUPPORTIVE.
I was dropping my son off at school recently and there is church nearby where I had parked my car. Alongside the church is a beautiful garden and in that garden there was a headstone that caught my attention. It was a headstone with the picture of a baby in-utero and it was dedicated to all the unborn children in the world. The headstone had the name of a baby who died in utero at about 5 month’s gestation. It wasn’t some pro-life stunt; this was a real headstone for a real fetus who died leaving a family devastated.
If I can do it, I will try and post a picture of the headstone (without the family’s name). I would like to thank that family for putting that headstone there and for the church for allowing it, because I now have a place to go and lay flowers on my “bad” days. Because frankly, my girlfriends don’t get it. This headstone gives me an outlet, a place that recognizes what I and so many others have been through.
And for those of you who have experienced a pregnancy loss you have my empathy and a giant cyber hug. To that celebrity who just announced her pregnancy at 6 months, you have my congratulations. To that cyber author, I can’t post what I think about you, but I do hope that you never have to endure what so many of us have been through.
Filed under: Check This Out, Current Affairs, Faith and Infertility, In the News, Infertility In The Movies etc., Infertility on Television, IVF, Personal Musings, Recurrent Pregnancy Loss, Thinking Out Loud, Treatment
More “Octomom” Fall-Out, should her doctor lose his license?
October 16, 2010 | By: Elizabeth
According to a report in a Los Angeles newspaper today, the Octomom’s doctor is facing a hearing on Monday where he may lose his license. Personally, I think what he did was malpractice and showed tremendous lack of forethought regarding the impact on this woman’s life and her family. I don’t know that he could have predicted the societal impact and the repercussion in the reproductive medical industry. But I wanted to know what you think!
With all the recent emphasis on single embryo transfer, and avoidance of multiple pregnancy (a twin pregnancy is now considered a management failure at some IVF Clinics), should patients in consultation with their doctors be the ones to choose to how many embryos to transfer or should doctors face regulation or possible loss of their medical license for listening to their patient when she asks to have multiple embryos transferred when it might be advisable to limit the number transferred?
Here’s the link to the article for more info:#mce_temp_url#
(in case the link doesn’t work, cut and paste this URL http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_16351124)
Filed under: Check This Out, Current Affairs, In the News, Infertility on Television, Personal Musings, Thinking Out Loud
Tags: Economy, hollywood, infertility, IVF, Success rates
Law and Order Disappoints by Getting the Law WRONG on egg donation and the law as it pertains to same sex couples in NY!
May 13, 2010 | By: Elizabeth
I rarely watch television anymore. I am lucky if I get time late at night to watch something and then I usually elect to watch a re-run of The West Wing. However, the other night DH and I decided to stay up late and watch some television and he put on one of my favorite shows, Law and Order. This episode may have been a re-run but I am not certain; we were watching it on NBC during it’s regular time slot 10-11 pm ET. We only caught the last half hour, the part that always deals with the trial. This fact pattern was very convoluted and revolved around a conspiracy by a doctor and a family to cause someone’s death of cancer at a certain time so that specific amounts of money would pass to certain descendants and not to other people or organizations (I didn’t catch the fact pattern well and it was really intricate). Had the guy died of cancer on his own before some date the defendant and her partner would have inherited ten million dollars.
In the story, the prosecutor decided to use the fact that one of the defendants (who was a daughter of the guy who died and who was supposed to inherit ten million dollars) had conceived a child with her lesbian partner using an egg donor (at least I think it was an egg donor, it could have been that the defendant female partner had donated her eggs to her lesbian partner so that her partner could carry the baby for them to raise together . . . however, the prosecutor kept using the term “egg donor” so I assumed that the couple had used an egg donor and were planning on raising the baby together). To further complicate matters, the lesbian couple had entered into an adoption whereby one partner had adopted the other so that they could obtain insurance together etc. and more relevant to the Law and Order story line, to inherit money together.
The prosecutor wanted to use the fact that the baby, because it was conceived via an egg donor, was not really their child (biological or otherwise) to cut off any inheritance rights the baby might have to the ten million dollars, and thus deny the defendant her right to benefit from the baby inheriting the money.
This had to be a recent episode of Law and Order as the prosecutor is someone new, and Sam Waterston (sp?) is now the District Attorney or is in a more senior role and not trying cases. The law as it pertains to same sex couples in NY has been pretty well established for several years. Adopting an adult for purposes of a establishing a legal relationship between same sex partners is extremely difficult to do, and I believe there are and have been enough other laws that protect or recognize same sex marriages in NY that the adoption aspect of the story line was just plain stupid and offensive (if not legally wrong)! I don’t believe that one adult can adopt another adult. But . . .
Second and more to the point. Law and Order got the law wrong on egg donation!!!!!!!!!!!
Let’s assume first that it was a true egg donation whereby this couple used an egg donor to conceive a child they would parent together (and not that one partner was donating her egg to the other for purposes of conception). In NY, although there is no statute, there is a case that specifically states that woman who gives birth to a child or children conceived via egg donation is the legal and natural mother of that child or children. McDonald v. McDonald, 196 A.D.2d 7, 12, 608 N.Y.S.2d 477 (App. Div. 2d Dep’t 1994) (finding woman who gave birth to child conceived through egg donation to be “the natural mother of the children. . . .”). Indeed, this case and a long line of other cases in NY deal with the presumption that a woman who gives birth to a child in NY is the legal and natural mother of that child.
Law and Order usually has lawyers that check the facts and the law on its episodes. I am absolutely dumbfounded that they got this so wrong. Regardless of whether one member of this partnership donated an egg to her partner or whether they used an egg donor, that baby was the legal child of the woman who was going to give birth to it. Assuming the two members of this partnership had a legal relationship that could be recognized in NY (and maybe I am wrong on the adoption thing, but it seems that in 2010 it is easier to go to MA or Canada and get married than to try and adopt an adult (???) to create a legal union), that baby was a baby of their partnership and their love for one another, and if the baby was delivered in New York City or any of the five boroughs and they were legally married, then both of their names would go on the birth certificate.
This manipulative and legally inaccurate representation of same sex partnership laws, same sex parentage laws, and egg donation is staggeringly offensive and WRONG. Where were Law and Order’s lawyers in this? Do they no longer check that their story lines are factually and legally correct? And if they have lawyers, may I take a guess that their lawyers are 80 year old homophobic men and that the show’s writers must have been on acid when they wrote this episode.
I am anxious to watch a re-run of this show and figure out what the facts were, and to determine just how wrong Law and Order got the law and order of reproductive law.
Filed under: adoption, Egg Donation, Infertility on Television, Same Sex Parenting and Reproductive Law, Thinking Out Loud
Tags: adoption, Egg Donation, hollywood, Law and Order, same sex parenting, television
