Infertility Myths

Say one word about struggling to conceive and generally you’ll get a fantastic assortment of popularpsychology ideas and home remedies designed to help you churn out babies at a fantastic rate. Everyone has an opinion – your great aunt, the shop attendant, the taxi driver – and infertility myths abound. Everybody seems to know exactly how to solve your infertility difficulties and the information you receive is usually vaguely useful at best or extremely tactless and inaccurate at worst.

Friends and relations will find a vast array of factors to blame for infertility, but usually they have to do with something you did wrong. They may hint that you are too desperate to get pregnant, or that maybe you don’t want it enough (unconsciously of course, so you can’t contradict it). Maybe I’m mistaken, but if not wanting a pregnancy made you infertile, then surely there wouldn’t be as many unwanted pregnancies.
Other relatives, perhaps the guy’s relatives, may be tempted to blame it on the woman, because infertility is the woman’s problem in the end, and we don’t like to think that possibly he inherited his low sperm count from us. The numbers indicate that generally women and men are equally infertile. About 1/3 of all instances of infertility are a result of difficulties with the woman’s reproductive capacity, and another third is a result of issues on the man’s part. The final third is formed by the instances where no cause can be found, or cases where both parties have problems. So this is one of those instances where blame is certainly unhelpful.
Lots of people lie to blame the contraceptive pill for infertility. Those nasty hormones could really mess up your fertility, from the pits of hell they are! Even with its bad rep, the pill doesn’t cause infertility, but it may conceal any fertility issues that are already present. Your neighbor may have a story about her sister who conceive 6 months after she and her husband adopted – heck, everyone seems to have one of those stories, but when do they ever tell you the story of those who didn’t get pregnant after they adopted? Not a chance, it doesn’t make for interesting storytelling, and nobody wants to ruin a good story with pesky facts?
A standard remark that really gets me upset is the one where someone, obviously aiming to be helpful, remarks that maybe you weren’t destined to have babies of your own, it just isn’t your fate, and ‘everything happens for a purpose’ you know, you’ll see, it will all make you stronger. How do they get a hotline to ‘Discover your Supreme Destiny’ and you don’t? There are also those who will try to encourage you by letting you know that you are doing your bit to decrease overpopulation. Verdict: unhelpful.

That said, there is sometimes a minutely tiny bit of fact in some of those infertility myths. When you stumble upon these infertility myths you just need to make sure you do your research so you can set those nosy old ladies right and possibly even get some information that might actually help you.

Here is more information on Infertility Information. Here is a website with a free mini-course dedicated to Infertility.