Baby or House? You Can't Have Both

Written in 2021

Two autumns ago I was watching my favorite sappy TV show in my underwear at noon, (don’t judge) and doing chores around the house when my soon-to-be gestational carrier (or surrogate, for those who don’t know infertility speak) asked me how I was doing. Feeling sorry for myself I tell her I’m on my period, to which she replies,

“What could you use? Coconut water? Popsicles?”

“Hysterectomy :-P” I say.

You see, I’d just been to my local fertility center. This place looks like the Chanel of doctors offices. Travertine lines the floors, and the gentlest of sea foam greens saturate every wall around me. The reception desk makes a U around the middle of the room and on either side is a sitting area straight out of an issue of Coastal Living. Prominently displayed high up in the center of the room is a gargantuan framed picture of a 20-something pregnant blonde Isla Fisher look-a-like cradling her unborn baby in a cream Grecian gown rippling behind her toward the Bonneville Salt Flats. As if we all magically look like that with our petri dish babies. Pfft!

After signing in, I take my seat right across from an alcove with a porcelain bust of a woman arched over a newborn. You cannot tell where the woman ends and the newborn starts as if to say that the mother/child bond is perfectly seamless. I know the fertility center has good intentions and they want to fill us tragic empty women with hope, but instead I feel more like the Nike in the Louvre, trying desperately to stand straight despite gail-force gusts of depression so powerful and unsettling that my head and my arms are already knocked off. All I have left is a heart and a will to keep standing.

Feeling the burn of unwanted tears I instantly look up at the TV mounted above me listening to the faint newsreel for any tragic story to remind me that everything around me is the Kool-Aid I can’t afford to drink, a third time.

I’d stupidly taken in the Kool-Aid first when they did an implantation (put one of our embryos inside a surrogate) fall of 2017. The doctor took pains to reassure me (after I’d shelled out $6,000 dollars between her and the fertility pharmacy) that implanting one embryo was very safe, and was incredibly reliable. Three months into the pregnancy and we miscarried which none of the staff could explain. That was $2,500 in non-refundables to my lawyer and $3,000 in aggregate payments to our surrogate after the heart beat was discovered in the 8th week. My surrogate and I waited another nine months for the both of us to be in an emotional place to do another implantation. In that time I called the fertility center and asked if they could guarantee a baby or money back. They literally said they got enough business they didn’t have to! Irritated but feeling backed in a corner, we ate beans and rice, and stopped buying anything for several months in order to save another $4,000 in late 2018 for a second implantation, and this time we insisted on putting in two healthy embryos. Somehow both inexplicably died during the process.

Despite the three hints that the cosmos don’t want me pregnant, everyone kept telling me I would be a great mom some day (to which I’d be rude if I didn’t give my most generous smile and say, ‘I hope so too’).

Then on a random evening in July of 2019 I happen to chortle my way through the creation of a profile on a surrogacy Facebook page and spill our nine year long saga to try and have our first child, complete with pictures of my husband and I, and our dog for good measure. An hour later we connect with a woman who would be thrilled to work with us, and several months of daily Marco Polos brings us to my first appointment back at the fertility center for a third try.

Mind you, I know how this works. My sister’s friggin baby announcements are displayed proudly in these designer hallways showing off her #6miracles. No pressure Jules. You got this. They will like you for you. This time around I was determined to do this all without the shackles of debt weighing down my marriage again until Ryan and I looked like Flotsum and Jetsum. The only hitch was that by now the one embryo I still had left in their freezer, had been thawed during the last implantation, which in essence killed it. That meant the only choice we had was to do another retrieval and fertilization.

After being seated in front of a new doctor (two failed implantations is where I draw the line with the old one), he’s already putting a calendar in front of me detailing what medicines will be ordered two days from then (so as to catch it before my period begins) and when he will do the fertilization and freezing. These calendars are marked with special colors for certain medicine days and I grab hold of Ryan’s knee next to mine, and squeeze. I squeeze to keep from feeling the room turn, the sides of my vision from blacking out, and from crumbling into a blob of unrelenting pity tears as I cry, ‘don’t give me hope until you’ve shown me the cost!’

Being the emotion-bottler that I am, I channeled all that into my fingers around his knee cap, until Ryan got the hint and took my hand in his to silently absorb the volcano of emotions threatening to erupt. Once the doctor stopped shoving hope down my throat and sent us on our way (without breaking down the cost), Ryan leads me out the door like I’m a poor dairy cow bonked in the head too many times.

Two days later they finally let me meet with the financial coordinator of the facility and she has the price sheet I’d asked to see before the doctor visit. (Why was I surprised they did it in that order? That’s sales 101) The attractive blonde woman greets me in a trim grey dress suit with a firm handshake and generous smile but

all I could see was a haggard witch from Snow White handing me a pristine red apple that I know had worms inside called debt, despair, miscarriage, upside-down home ownership, and chronic manic depression.

I know instinctively that I have to show her my best ‘used-car-buying-Jules,’ and see through the smiles and the sweet voices to her dollar signs for eye balls.

“So you are saying that some insurance companies cover infertility treatments?” I ask.

Suddenly the $9,296 next to her index finger, for my cycle fee doesn’t look so scary and I feel a pen light of hope.

“Yes…That being said,

…I’ve spoken with your insurance company and they only cover a diagnosis of infertility. That means this (she’s pointing to the typed sum total of $24,245) will be patient responsibility.”

The pen-light was gone, snuffed out. I was sitting in a vacuum devoid of hope. Stunned I tell her that if by some fairy tale we can come up with such a crazy sum of money, it will be because we both were working two jobs because I was not taking a single loan out.

Then I walked out to my car, my body feeling as heavy as if made of lead, and my face felt hot with held back sobs. A few years ago when we’d done the last retrieval, our work reimbursed us for whatever fertility treatment we needed. I felt like a blob of regret now, sitting in the driver’s seat of my car wanting desperately to run back through time so I could do lots of retrievals and never run out. Why, why, why, was it legal for insurance companies to exclude fertility treatments?

So is it any wonder that days later when the first sign of a period showed up, I walked around in my underwear with curtains drawn, wishing I could get rid of my entire reproductive system? There was no affording children. Who was I kidding?

I’m not the only one this is happening to either. One in ten couples suffer from infertility, which tells me that the laws surrounding infertility medical coverage are woefully inadequate. H.B. 347 was a bill voted into Utah law in 2014 that details the right for a business to allow an employee to trade their $4,000 credit toward adoption to be switched and used for infertility expenses, but for anyone who has done IVF of IUI, this only covers a small fraction of the overall expense. More bills need to be written, lobbyist need to broker with politicians, and businesses need to consider care for infertility as important as pregnancy coverage. Talk to your local representatives and tell them you want to help with any bill that provides better incentives for infertility coverage in your state. For those with an entrepreneur spirit, companies like Progyny noticed a void in this niché. As of the 2020 census there were 331,449,281 people in the United States. Of those, 3,344,928 people suffer from infertility. Progyny is tapping into this vast group of people who are underserved by offering infertility coverage plans to employers, but clearly there is room here for more companies to pop up. Ten percent of the American population should not have to choose between living in a home or having a baby.

#Infertility

#IVF

#Fertility

#IUI