Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Are Bank Loans for IVF Ethical?

I thought long and hard before deciding to post on this topic today. To say it’s controversial is an understatement. But it can’t all be pretty all the time, so here goes:

 

The Bioethics Center, part of New Zealand’s University of Otago, recently posed this ethical question: “Are banks wrongfully exploiting the childless by offering and advertising loans for IVF?”

 

Apparently, ASB bank in New Zealand offers (and makes no bones about advertising) loans to pay for IVF treatments. They have produced a very emotional and persuasive commercial to promote their product. You can watch it on YouTube, but I’m warning you to do so at your own risk. This is direct-to-the-gut advertising at its best.

 

I have very mixed feelings about this subject. On the one hand, I don’t believe that IVF and other fertility treatments should only be available to the wealthy (and at anywhere from $10,000 – $20,000 a round, it’s not something that’s accessible to everyone.)

 

On the other hand, commercials like this fuel the notion that there’s always something else to try, always one more hope left, when sometimes, it’s just time to stop. It targets people when they are at their most vulnerable. In the banking world, they call that a predatory loan.

 

So the question I’m posing to you is this: is it ethical for a bank to offer and advertise loans to pay for IVF?

 

I’ll look forward to hearing your opinions.

 

Announcing the Official Release of My New Book

Drum roll please!

It’s official. My new book is finally available in print!

It feels like this has been a long time coming and I think I’ve sprouted one or two extra grey hairs along the way, but finally it’s here. I’m very excited to be able to share this story and it’s my hope that it will help to shed a little more light on what it means to be childless-(not-exactly)-by-choice.

If you’d like to buy a copy, you can get one here. If you’re an Amazon.com shopper, it will be in stock there sometime next week. I’ll keep the links updated as it makes it way into other outlets.

In the meantime, thank you for your continued support, for dropping in on this site, reading my ramblings, and sharing your own. I really appreciate knowing you’re out there.

As a small thank you and bit of a celebration, I thought I’d have a contest to win a copy of the book. Just leave a comment on this post and I’ll randomly select a winner at the end of the day tomorrow.

Thanks again for your support.

~Lisa

Empathy With a Killer

I read this very disturbing story in yesterday’s LA Times. Former Food Network Chef, Juan-Carlos Cruz was recently sentenced to nine years in state prison after being convicted of paying a homeless man $1,000 to murder Cruz’s wife. The details in the newspaper of how Cruz suggested the man strangle his victim to avoid “a mess,” and how he provided doggie treats to keep his dogs from barking, are truly sickening. Regardless I read on, wondering what possible motivation there could be for this heinous crime.

A few more paragraphs in, I found his motivation: infertility.

According to the article:

Cruz told detectives when he was arrested that his wife had been “going through a midlife crisis” after unsuccessfully trying fertility treatments for more than a decade, according to the report. The couple spent more than $200,000 on fertility treatments and Cruz said he believed that killing his wife was “a ‘merciful’ way to end her suffering.”

The article continues:

Cruz, who told detectives he had considered taking his own life, said that Mother’s Day was especially painful for his wife and that he could not bear seeing her. When investigators asked Cruz when he began looking for someone to kill his wife, he told them that he had been looking for several weeks and wanted the task completed by Mother’s Day.

And this is the point where I actually felt sorry for the guy who plotted to kill his wife.

We all know (especially those of us who are childless-not-by-choice—just how hard Mother’s Day can be. I could picture this poor woman, already at the end of her rope, facing another Mother’s Day without children of her own. And I could picture her husband, at a total loss as to how to help her get through this. I can see the expression on his face, because I’ve seen that same look on my husband’s face when facing another infertility land mine and being powerless to do anything about it. Maybe murder was the only proactive thing that Cruz could come up with to help his wife.

Granted (as far as I know) my husband never conspired to have me bumped off, and I’m not condoning Cruz’s decision, but I can empathize with his motivation, even if I can’t understand, or forgive, his actions.

Whiny Wednesday

It’s Whiny Wednesday and I have two whines today.

The first is that even though I’ve been using the usual Whiny Wednesday image since the dawn of this blog, suddenly my computer has decided it’s no longer a valid image. Whatever. Technology and me…we’re just not getting along lately.

Whine #2 is this: I’m toodling around on the internet last night, doing a bit of research for a new project and, of course, I get distracted. Through a series of “Hmm, that’s interesting” clicks I end up looking at a website offering fertility retreats. Sisters, I have been down this road before. I know how this story ends, and yet I still catch myself thinking, “Hmm, what if…?” 

It’s a sickness, I know. I took my medicine, stood in the corner and said, “Bad Lisa,” and I’m okay now, but really, when is this insanity actually going to end?

Anyway, it’s December 1 – 30 days until the end of another year – and I have a long list of whines I could share, but for now I turn it over to you. Whine on, sisters.

Time to Lose My “Baby” Fat

This morning I got up at 5:20 and left the house in the dark and the cold to go to a Beach Bootcamp. I spent an hour running in the sand, pulling a weighted sled, doing push-ups, sit-ups, planks, and squat thrusts. My heart thudded, my chest burned, and my legs screamed. But it felt great.

Once upon a time I was in good shape. I ran marathons, did triathlons, climbed mountains, and rode my bike. Then I decided I wanted to be a mother and the whole thing fell apart. As I tried to get pregnant, taking care of my body meant not pushing it too hard, not asking it to do anything dangerous, and not putting it under any stress. Over the course of five years I accumulated baby fat without accumulating a baby.

It’s been almost two years now since I got off the crazy train and started learning to accept my childfree life, but I feel as if I’ve lost so much ground, physically. I look at some of my friends who are older than me and see that physical fitness has very little to do with age. I am now out of excuses.

So I’m back. I’m going to whip myself into shape and lose that baby fat!

Are you taking care of yourself? If not, get a jump-start on your New Year’s Resolutions and join me. Oh, and please check in on me once in a while, would you, in case I forget all this fighting talk.

Announcing the Official Release of My New Book

I am very excited indeed to announce the official release of my new book I’m Taking My Eggs and Going Home: How One Woman Dared to Say No to Motherhood.

It’s currently available in e-book format from Smashwords.com and Amazon.com, and next month it will also be available in the good old-fashioned printed version. You can be sure I’ll let you know when that happens.

If you’re an e-reader type or just can’t wait for the printed version, I’m offering the book at a special price for Life Without Baby readers. Download the book from Smashwords and use the code FB35D to get it half price – $4.95 instead of $9.95.

If you do read it, and love it, please tell everyone. If you read and don’t love it, please just tell me.

We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow, but for today, it’s all about the book.

My Book

This week I received the final cover design for my upcoming book, and next week the e-reader version of the book will be released.

It’s hard to describe all the emotions I’m riding through right now – excitement, pride, anxiety, second-guessing, and something else, some kind of melancholy.

I’m excited because this project has been a long time in the works. I’ve written it, added to it, edited it, and then last year I scrapped the entire manuscript (I mean every word of it) and started again with a blank page. (I’m getting a stomach ache just thinking about that!)  It had to be done and I’m glad I did it, but it was hard.

I’m proud because I stuck to it, I finished it, I didn’t let it collect dust in the bottom drawer of my desk, and I have fought to get it published and out into the world.

Which is where the anxiety comes in.

I’m anxious about putting such a personal story out there for everyone to see. Not so much the people who will hopefully benefit from reading it, but the lookie-loos, people who know me, or my husband, and want to get the gossip. I’m also anxious about the people in the book – my family and friends, my husband’s family – people who said or did the wrong thing without ever knowing it, and unwittingly gave me material. But everything in the story happened, and (as my friend Jeff says) it’s not mean if it’s true. But I still worry about what they’ll think.

I can’t quite figure out the melancholy. Maybe it comes from the feeling of something coming to an end (even though I know that many new things are just beginning), I’m not sure. An acquaintance asked me how I came to choose the topic and I explained that this is my story and that the topic chose me. And maybe that’s where the melancholy comes from. I’m very glad I wrote this book, but there’s still a part of me that wishes the topic had chosen someone else instead.

Other People’s Blogs and Facebook

Last night I sat down to write a bunch of posts to keep on hand as the holidays open up next week and attempt to gobble me whole. I figured if I can get ten or so pieces drafted, I can pull from them if I find myself falling behind.

Instead, I ended up hanging out on everyone else’s blogs. Ah well.

The good news is that I found this hilarious post on Julie’s blog A Little Pregnant (not a blog I would ordinarily hang out on, but you start on one person’s blog and before you know it you’re back at the old infertility blogs again.)

Please, take a moment and check out her imaginary Facebook page. It’s brilliant. I think we’ve all had experience with these sorts of “friends.”

And Facebook is a hot topic on the forums right now.

I’ve recently noticed that fewer and fewer of my favorite people are posting on Facebook anymore. Perhaps they’re out having interesting lives instead.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolff?

A couple of weekends ago I went to a local theatre to see the Edward Albee play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It’s a play that was lauded when it was first produced in the ‘60s, and was made more famous by the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie version. It’s the story of George and Martha, a bitter married couple, living an illusion, and dragging a young unsuspecting couple into their turmoil. I’ve seen the play and the movie in the past, but it wasn’t until I saw it this time that the story really hit me.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Early in the story, the subject of George and Martha’s son comes up, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear that someone is not telling the truth about the son. At the end of the play, it is revealed that George and Martha couldn’t have children, and the fictional son is part of a twisted psychological game the couple plays together. What makes the story heart-wrenching is that it becomes apparent that the game is ordinarily a tender private game, but in the play they have broken their own rule and made their son public. Consequently the game becomes a bitter, ugly battle.

Martha is a drunk and a philanderer, she’s bitter, twisted, and frankly, unhinged. She is also childless-not-by-choice. It’s easy to dismiss Martha as crazy, but seeing the play this time, I found myself nodding, and saying to myself, “Yes, I can see how she became the way she is.” Martha had great expectations for her life and it just didn’t turn out the way she planned, so she fabricated the life she wanted instead.

I could have written a post today about how childless women are so often portrayed as anything from odd to downright crazy, but the truth is, Albee took the very real emotions and social stigma of being childless-not-by-choice and created an extreme, but very real scenario. In my opinion Who’s Afraid Virginia Woolf deserves all the critical acclaim it received.

A Beautiful Voice for the Childless

Monica Wiesblott just closed a beautiful exhibition of her artwork in her show Barren: Life on Infertile Soil. If you didn’t make it the show, you can view it in her online gallery of the show.

I didn’t go to the show, even though I wanted to meet Monica and the gallery is just a couple of hours from my home. My mum is still here with me and I just wasn’t ready to take her with me nor was I able to get away alone. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that, although my mother knows about my infertility, we don’t really talk about it, and I’m okay with that. I get to talk to you about it instead. J So I wasn’t ready to open up that Pandora ’s Box with my mother by taking her to the show. Maybe one day, maybe not.

But I did view Monica’s show online, in the privacy of my own room. It’s beautiful and frank, sometimes even raw, but most of all it is courageous. Monica has put out there in photographs and sculpture, what many of us who have dealt with infertility, or who are otherwise childless-not-by-choice, have felt and experienced.

Monica told me:

“I have received a lot of wonderful positive response from the show, many people have cried in the gallery and many, many others have trusted me enough to share their stories of loss. I am usually approached with the words, “I have never told anyone this….”

It’s my hope that if people like Monica keeping talking and showing, fewer women will have to say, “I have never told anyone this….”

Please check out the show online. Monica is hoping to take the show to other galleries, so if you happen to move in artistic circles and can help, please let Monica know.