Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (92 page)

A certain percentage of women who’ve been told that they are infertile for a medical reason get pregnant even without treatment. Infertility is never a completely straightforward affair. Many physical, emotional, and psychological factors are involved in conception, so many that it is ridiculous to try to reduce fertility to a matter of injecting the right hormone at the right time. An infertility specialist I met once said, “I do all the latest high-tech surgery and hormone treatment to try to make someone pregnant. When it is all said and done, I still don’t know who will get pregnant and who won’t and why. After all my years of training, this area is still a big mystery that I can’t control.”

The conventional “management” of infertility generally focuses on the body as a hormonal machine and in large part ignores emo tional, psychological, and even nutritional factors that have physical and hormonal manifestations.
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Though the mind-body connection in infertility has been appreciated for decades, only recently has this important link begun to be explored more seriously. As our society has become more technologically focused, the study of the mind-body connection in infertility holds the potential to help many couples, and a thorough psychological interview should be a routine part of every fertility investigation.
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When we focus only on the extremely expensive and invasive technology currently available for fertility, and forget the hearts and spirits of those going through these procedures, the results are often disappointing and even devastating.

In 2007, more than 57,000 infants were born as a result of assisted reproductive technology (ART), which represents 1.3 percent of the births in the United States. Despite its popularity, ART is not without significant risk. It is well documented that ART doubles to quadruples the risk of birth defects. It also increases the risk of multiple gestations, preterm delivery, low birth weight, chromosome abnormalities, adverse neurodevelopmental disorders, eclampsia, prenatal mortality, and placenta previa, and it results in an increased rate of C-section delivery.
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Over $1 billion is spent annually on overcoming infertility, and this figure is increasing.
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The bottom line here is that Mother Nature has some checks and balances that technology can’t bypass entirely.

Psychological Factors

On a personal level, many women do not get pregnant because in their hearts they really do not want to—they are afraid of the demands a child will make on them. In one study, women who were unsuccess ful with fertility treatments were found to be more successful in the outer world than those who conceived. The authors of the study inter preted this result as “an exaggerated positive attitude as an attempt to overcome inner fears, doubts, and ambivalence” about having a child.
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Caroline Myss explains that women have only so much second-chakra energy. If a woman is using her ambition for career success and is already very busy in this area, she may simply not have enough energy circuits available in her body to conceive a child unless she cuts back on other commitments. Many infertile women are working sixty to eighty hours per week and are exhausted; then they pursue having a child as though they were writing a Ph.D. dissertation. A prospective study done in Italy of women going through in vitro fertilization (IVF) or embryo transfer (ET) found that both vulnerability to stress and working outside the home were associated with a poor outcome of IVF or ET treatment, even though the straightforward medical causes of in fertility were distributed equally throughout the study group.
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Conceiving a child is a receptive act, not a marathon event that can be programmed into your BlackBerry. Several studies have indicated that excessive focus on the goal of having a child may result in premature maturation of the eggs in the ovary and subsequent release of eggs that are not ready for fertilization.
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I’d like to stress that having a job or career need not affect your fertility. Problems can arise, however, as a result of certain factors that are often associated with work, such as a perceived inability to get your needs met; a sense of lack of control in your life; and not feeling good about the work you’re doing, what that job represents in your life, or a career that is not an extension of your inner wisdom.

One fascinating study of heterosexual women undergoing donor insemination noted that after the first several attempts to produce pregnancy, the women, who were previously ovulatory, actually stopped ovulating. The authors concluded that artificial insemination—and any other mechanized, unnatural technique for “forcing” pregnancy—is on some level a traumatizing procedure that leads to the inhibition of the very process it is trying to accomplish. (This may or may not be true with lesbian couples or single women choosing motherhood because donor insemination is the only method for achieving pregnancy in these situations.) Interestingly, orgasm has been found to enhance a woman’s chances of conception. Involuntary vaginal and uterine movements that promote conception accompany orgasm. Failure to achieve orgasm may lead to circulatory changes in the blood flow to the pelvis, which can affect fertility.
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High-tech conception techniques, by their very design, completely ignore this aspect of fertility.

Whenever a woman feels conflicted over birthing, children, or the restrictions that children may impose once they arrive, infertility may result. Some studies from the 1940s through the 1990s have suggested an association between infertility and ambivalence toward pregnancy and children.

The relationships between husbands and wives who are infertile have also been studied. Many of the women in these studies had an actual aversion to intercourse; they had lower frequency of orgasm when they did have intercourse, and they felt a marked sexual disharmony in their partnership. When these women found more suitable partners, how ever, they became fertile.
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I have seen this phenomenon repeatedly in my practice, just as I have seen countless so-called infertile women con ceive shortly after adopting a baby. Psychological testing done on 117 husbands in infertile couples in one study indicated that the men had a pronounced lack of self-confidence, were introverted, and had decreased social assertiveness.
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The fertility-stress link remains controversial in conventional science, and it’s difficult to document a causal link between psychosocial distress and fertility. Though many studies do show that women with infertility are more apt to have depression and anxiety, most doctors believe that the depression and anxiety are the result of infertility, not the other way around. In any case, studies tend to be conflicting and not well controlled, and there are no prospective studies. In their review of forty years of research on psychological distress and infertility, psychologist Dr. W. A. Fisher and his colleague A. M. Brkovich summarized the viewpoint of most conventional doctors when they wrote: “Much research has been done to try to corroborate the proposition that psychological factors may be causally related to the occurrence of infertility, but no study has been able to confirm a causal relationship to date. In fact the very assumption of a psychological distress–infertility link has become quite controversial because some feel it blames women for their inability to conceive.”
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Despite this conventional opinion, failing to explore the psychoso cial aspects of fertility is a big mistake and robs a woman of all her options. There’s no doubt that subconscious fears about having a child can and do exert a powerful influence over the subtle endocrinologic processes that are required for conception. Perceived stress changes the way the hypothalamus of the brain functions, which affects ovulation. It also changes the immunologic functioning of the cells in the reproductive tract as well as elsewhere. When a woman learns how to modulate her stress effectively, her fertility can change. This was demonstrated by Alice Domar, Ph.D., based on her work with a group of women with unexplained infertility in her mind-body program at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. Thirty-four percent of these women became pregnant within six months—which is much higher than the average pregnancy rate for infertile couples at six months. The mean duration of infertility had been 3.3 years.
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There is enormous potential for healing infertility when a woman is willing to acknowledge the role of her beliefs and commit to bringing them to consciousness and healing them. The first step—and the hardest step—in healing adverse subconscious programming about anything is being willing to accept yourself fully and unconditionally right now. This process involves never beating yourself up for “failing” to conceive because you waited too long, or “failing” at any thing else. It’s just the opposite of blame.

I’ve seen many women get pregnant once they committed to healing themselves on the deepest levels. One of the most striking examples of this is the story of my colleague Julia Indichova, who at the age of forty-three was unable to conceive a second child. She was told that her FSH level (the follicle-stimulating hormone from the pituitary gland, levels of which are often used to judge whether a woman is still producing fertile eggs) was too high. But her inner wisdom told her that wasn’t true. She changed her diet, began to do some deep soul searching, read everything she could, got her FSH down naturally, and eventually conceived and delivered a healthy daughter. Her book,
Inconceivable: A Woman’s Triumph over Despair and Statistics
(Broadway Books, 2001), tells her story. Julia now leads workshops for women diagnosed with infertility and has helped many heal their fertility and their lives. (For more infor mation, see Julia’s website,
www.fertileheart.com
.)

Niravi Payne, author of
The Whole Person Fertility Program
(Three Rivers Press, 1997) is another colleague, a therapist who has devoted her professional life to helping couples conceive through her Whole Person Fertility Program. (See
www.niravi.com
.) Her view of current fertility problems is both enlightening and empowering. It’s no accident, she says, that so many baby boomers had prob lems with fertility. A series of complex psychological, sociological, and political factors has led to unparalleled changes in our society in the last twenty-five years and has given rise to the decision of many to delay childbearing, thus altering the reproductive life pat terns familiar to their parents and the thirty thousand generations before them. Niravi writes, “In the space of one generation, middle-and upper-class Americans decided to defer childbearing for ten to twenty years. This may be the most radical voluntary alteration of the lifestyle of all of them, and, unquestionably, there have been physiologic consequences.”

Millions of boomers rebelled against the circumscribed lives that they saw their mothers living in the 1950s and 1960s. They said no to early marriage and childbearing and yes to defining and developing themselves. And many mothers of baby boomers, recognizing the lack of fulfillment and frustration that characterized their own lives, encouraged their daughters to seek college educations and professional careers. Ironically, many baby boomers had their first abortions around the same time that their mothers had their first children. Acknowledging how factors such as these may be affecting her in the present is often a woman’s first step toward healing her relationship with fertility.

Time and again, I have witnessed how unconsciously absorbed beliefs about pregnancy, sexuality, and having children can, in some cases, actually block fertility. For example, some women are actually very un happy with their current partner but are afraid to say so because they feel they have no alternative but to stay with him. Other women were told by their mothers that having babies could ruin their lives. Many mothers had no choice but to stay home and raise children, even when they had lots of talent and ambition in other areas. Their daughters often picked up on this and blame themselves for their mothers’ frustrations. They don’t want to risk passing this pain on to the next generation.

We have now passed the torch on to our daughters, who are facing more choices than ever before. Many thirtysomethings are being convinced they require reproductive technologies to get pregnant the moment they turn thirty-five. Others, who haven’t met Mr. Right by the time they are thirty, are wondering whether they should freeze their eggs. Regardless of your age, it’s crucial that you connect with your cyclic wisdom and your fertility—no technology can match your understanding of your body. In those women who are willing to come to terms with the unconscious beliefs that are really running their fertility, Niravi reports a subsequent pregnancy rate significantly higher than expected.

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HOULD
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REEZE (OR
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ONATE
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GGS?

A thirty-five-year-old friend of mine recently attended a party where she met and spoke with an infertility specialist who told her that she should freeze her eggs right away. She is not married but wants children. She asked me what I thought. She is very healthy, doesn’t smoke, and looks like her biological age isn’t much over twenty-five. I told her that chances were very good she’d be able to conceive on her own, and that once she meets the right guy, it won’t take very long to have a family. On the other hand, if she were undergoing chemo, I’d definitely suggest storing some eggs for the future. When it comes to donating eggs (which college students sometimes do for the money), I’m hesitant. I sure wouldn’t want my daughters to do it—for a couple of reasons. One is that the drugs used to stimulate the ovaries for egg retrieval are designed to produce lots of eggs at one time. This can trigger ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, the symptoms of which include nausea and vomiting, abdominal discomfort, shortness of breath, labored breathing, clotting disorders, renal failure, and occasionally death.
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There’s also the possible risk that egg harvesting will result in decreased fertility in the future. You might donate your eggs in college to pay tuition, only to have trouble starting your own family in your early thirties. Talk about regretting a decision! These are a few of the reasons why egg harvesting must be thought through very carefully.