As I mused over some artifact of my isolation – how disconnected I felt from my online infertility groups; why I felt I couldn’t tell other people we were struggling to conceive – I often thought back to my experience of having had an abortion in my mid-twenties. How it was…well, if not pleasant, exactly, about as untraumatic as having an unwanted fetus sucked out through my cervix could be. Unlike what I was going through with infertility, my abortion did not rock my sense of self: I emerged from it intact. This wasn’t inevitable. In previous decades, women who sought abortions, especially young, unmarried women like I was, were only one thing: sluts. But by the time I slid into the stirrups, the women’s movement had been working for decades to not only ensure that abortion was safe and accessible, but to humanize the women who got them. For the 1990s era, third-wave feminist culture I came of age with, the demonizing of women who had abortions was almost as tragic as the policy that restricted access to them. The stereotypes around abortion-seeking had been shaped by eons of stigma, and had the potential to affect multiple areas of a woman’s life. In addition to their tireless and often dangerous work countering policies that restricted safe abortion, feminist actors disseminated literature about abortion, collected data, and provided visible support to female patients. Some laudable organizations even matched abortion patients with volunteers so that vulnerable women did not have to navigate the experience alone. This continues today, bolstered by digital abortion activism. On a grassroots level, both in-person and online groups exist to help women process their experiences with abortion, teasing out the ways in which their experiences might also be shaped by other realities of their lives, like race and sexuality and class.
During the months around my own abortion, I frequented one group like this online. There was a galvanizing, seventies-ish vibe I found healing. We discussed things like whether or not speculums needed to be so medieval; we wondered what terminating a pregnancy might be like if the procedure had been designed by female doctors. At the heart of all our conversations was a deeper questioning of the isolation and shame that traditionally marked women who had abortions. Several other women who participated in these chats went on to political work, trying to improve policy that would help women gain access to safe abortions and feel supported.
Coming from the world of abortion to the world of infertility, I felt like I had jetted back in time. While researching this book, I posted a question on a few message boards, asking for stories from other infertile women about how feminism may have affected their experiences with infertility. Two groups removed the post as violating a rule of ‘no politics allowed.’
In The Experience of Infertility, one of the few books on infertility written by infertile women, authors Naomi Pfeffer and Anne Woollett describe how the dominant view of infertility as primarily a medical problem effectively erased women’s own experiences. At the time of publication, 1983, the existing information on infertility was all ‘from the doctor’s point of view.’ These texts
give us a lot of information about the mechanics of the tests [but] do not say how it feels to undergo them, whether they hurt, or are emotionally upsetting. Because our experiences do not match the perspectives of the doctor, we feel that we are somehow bizarre or unusual.
Pfeffer and Woollett go on to attribute the paucity of women-centred infertility literature to the lack of attention to infertility within the women’s movement:
These feelings of isolation were accentuated for us because, as feminists, we had expected to be able to talk to other women, to be able to discuss our infertility within a feminist context. But we found the taboos and silence on infertility just as strong within the women’s movement. This made us feel sad and sometimes very angry. It denied the reality of our experience … Margaret Sanger, a pioneer of birth control, wrote … ‘No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.’ But this right to choose is defined in terms of the right not to have children. The right to have children…is much less considered. Even further down this list of ‘priorities’ are the rights of infertile women whose experiences and needs remain largely invisible.
Though written decades earlier, this book became one of the few texts on infertility that accurately captured my experience. I felt a sense of double alienation: on the one hand, from an infertility community that rejected feminism, and on the other, from a feminism that ignored and misunderstood the lives of infertile women. If the former consigned my infertility to a stereotype, to one thing, the latter had reduced it to no thing at all.
Seeing women like the mother in the park would heighten my sense of difference and isolation, but so too would women like my childless-by-choice, feminist female friends who posted memes like ‘resistance is fertile’ on Twitter, and rallied every year at SlutWalk and the Women’s March. I don’t go to events like this anymore, but every so often I’ll spend a whole afternoon looking at photos of them online, feeling envious and admiring and bitter all at once. The crowds of women occupying space, and the novelty of this. The muchness of them! Flushed faces overlaid by signs: ‘My Body, My Choice.’ Women holding babies in carriers holding their own signs: ‘Future Feminist.’ Feminist mothers – these were the hardest to look at.
I wondered what these women knew about infertility, and what they thought about infertile women like me. Whether they felt that ‘choice’ extended to women like me, who wanted kids but couldn’t have them. Whether, like many feminists, they thought surrogacy and egg donation – advanced technologies we were pursuing – meant the de facto enslaving of poor women by privileged white women like me. There were always women in these crowds holding signs referencing the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale – had they noticed how, in its world view, feminine infertility is equated with feminine evil, and the only ‘real’ mothers are those who give birth?
Statistically, at least one in five of those feminist mothers had once struggled to conceive. They knew the pain of longing and isolation, the song of infertility, even if it wasn’t something they talked about a lot now, or thought to write on a sign. I wondered if I had encountered any of them before, in the waiting rooms of fertility clinics, or in online groups where women talked about their follicle counts, and how many embryos their doctors told them to expect, and how alone they felt. We may have passed each other without recognition, without impacting each other, ephemeral.
The irony here was profound. If I, as an infertile person, felt insubstantial, the work of infertility – to process and cope with thwarted longing, and to build, in some cases, a family – was solid. More than that, it was bodily – often in the sense of prolonged medical labour, but always through the physical transformations on the level of one’s muscles, hormones, and fat cells that remake infertile women into animals that have survived grief. And whether or not we disclosed our infertility, we were also doing social and emotional work, reconfiguring every relationship that branched out from that central, unrealized dyad of us-plus-child. That the work of infertility only sometimes produced children did not make it less productive. Resolved or not, recognized or not, infertility, just like pregnancy, always forged new women with new inner and outer worlds.
I started researching this book as a way to find words for an experience for which few seemed to exist – what Virginia Woolf, writing about illness, called a ‘poverty of the language … a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain.’ But what I found was, in fact, that not only were representations of infertility everywhere, they suffused everything. Narratives of infertility were the manna in which every other story about women took shape: every tale about what it means to be a woman, about what women’s work is and does, and how we should or could become mothers. How beneath every story of a woman and a child was the unspoken threat of a woman without a child, longing for a child. Considered with one eye to feminist history, this erasure is functionally systematic: the refusal of feminist policy and culture to recognize and support the labour of infertile women mirrors and upholds its refusal to recognize and support other women doing other kinds of work, in different and even less visible margins. In this sense, the story of infertility vis-à-vis feminism speaks to a broader difficulty the women’s movement has had with difference among