The Seed. Alexandra Kimball
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while I had been disappointed in what feminism had had to say about female infertility, I found that, once located, what infertility had to say about feminism was expansive and provocative – productive. My challenge was less about articulating the ephemeral than about uncovering: finding where female infertility was hidden in all the stories we’re often told about women, old and new, normative and feminist. To dig it out – to try to see what other stories it might suggest once unearthed. It was not so different from the work I was doing as an infertile woman and, later, as an expectant mother, and then, finally, as a new parent. As with all birth projects, what follows is an exercise in differentiation, in untangling old and fused roots.
One
The summer after our third miscarriage, Jeremy convinced me to go to a fancy party for his work. He thought that dressing up and eating a nice meal in a ballroom with other dressed-up people might distract me. I sat in my cocktail dress – too tight on my post-IVF bloat – and held my husband’s hand under the table. Occasionally a waiter would pass by with canapés and I’d grab one with my free hand. The table was buzzing with wine-leavened conversation, with introductions and interruptions and compliments, especially for the women, who wore a lot of black and navy, modest necklines, the assured unchic of women who do not need to impress. They generated an air of capability and confidence, success.
I desperately, desperately did not want to talk to any of them. Over the past four years, socializing had become my biggest problem, second only to infertility. If you had asked me about my social life, I would have said, ‘It does not exist,’ though, in fact, all I did was talk to other people, in online support groups on Facebook and the forum sections of infertility websites. I’d wake up in the morning and log on and read and write all day with hundreds of infertile women, sharing details of our miscarriages, our IVF results, our search for a surrogate, and reply to their queries and stories in turn. But as soon as I logged off, I’d forget all about them. Not to say I found these groups useless – if I wasn’t happy about my condition, I was certainly grateful to have a place I could discuss it. But the occasion of these conversations left them feeling ghostly and unreal, in a way that talking with other women, even about other shitty and gendered topics, never had. The discussions in these forums seemed less like genuine attempts at conversation than they did like monologues, or the petitions ancient women used to inscribe on tablets, one by one, in front of oracles for Artemis and Zeus: Will there be children for me?
Part of this was inevitable, I thought: it’s difficult for someone so deep into her own suffering to connect with anyone else, let alone someone who is suffering just as much. But I also wondered about what I felt was a deeply unfeminist, even antifeminist, vibe at work in these spaces. Not because we were all struggling to have children, which, duh, is the number one edict of patriarchy, and not even because the majority of posters were not interested in feminism or politics (in fact, a significant number appeared to be right-wing Christian women). Rather, it’s that these groups are set up to benefit the individual infertile woman, as opposed to infertile women as a group. Regardless of the banner art on every page that urged members to support infertility research, or the white ribbons to which we dutifully changed our avatars every October to coincide with Infertility Awareness Month, posters rarely discussed ‘ending infertility.’ The purpose of these groups was not communal, it was individual – each member was there to figure out how she, personally, could have a baby. And once she did, it was rare to hear from her again. (Some groups have a separate section for infertile women who have successfully conceived – in one forum, this section was literally titled ‘The Other Side.’)
Still, the outside world – I thought of anything noninfertility-related as ‘outside’ and still do – was way worse. Somewhere along the four-year way, my outside friends – all feminists, all solidarity- and collective-minded – had retreated. I’d see them every once in a while, but they felt remote, far-off in their own galaxies of pregnancy, baby-raising, or simply just not being infertile. I backed off, too. Not infrequently, I’d think of one of these women and feel a sudden hurt, but I preferred this pain to the sharp vertigo I experienced whenever they said something to remind me of my new difference, my distance. Social life presented an agonizing conundrum: my infertility was the only thing in my life, and no one apart from other infertile women ever wanted to talk about it.
At Jeremy’s work party, I was trying to silently project a sense of my private agony, but eventually, the woman seated beside me tapped me on the hand and asked me my name. She was older than me, maybe fiftyish, with a coiffed bob and a pale pink satin pantsuit that was frivolous enough to suggest that maybe she wasn’t one of the many lawyers, but a lawyer’s wife. I hoped not, because the wives always asked me about kids. Which she did.
‘Do you have any kids?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Do you plan on having them?’ she asked. Her expression was quizzical, slightly amused.
‘We can’t,’ I said. ‘We’ve had three miscarriages.’
Despite being clinical, correct, the word miscarriage, like the word infertility, always suggests the particular unruliness of the female body – a mess of genitals and organs. And even given the culture’s nominal feminism (I would be shocked if any woman at that party would have rejected being labelled a feminist), there is a perpetual undercurrent of disgust about female genitals and organs. They are, in the words of French surrealist Michel Leiris, ‘unclean or as a wound … but dangerous in itself, like everything bloody, mucous, infected.’
Saying ‘miscarriage’ out loud was like putting my uterus on the table, bleeding and scarred and radiating misuse. Tears and death and not a small amount of sex. I felt vulgar, dropping this bit of feminine gore into the lighthearted civility of the room. I understood the irony: I had no more exposed my uterus by talking about my lack of children than any other woman who mentions ‘having kids.’ All children, living or dead, come from bloody uteruses and vaginas – things polite people don’t discuss – but the logic of misogyny, which carves out a space of relative respect for some mothers (especially the wealthy, white, and married), means we usually agree to forget this. The beauty of the child erases its origins in the female body and sexuality. But when these parts go wrong and there is no child, nothing is redeemed. It’s just the spectre of the female body and sexuality: blood, mucous, infection. Death.
A few moments passed. The woman’s mouth opened and closed over the empty air. The waiter came by again, and I plucked a canapé from a round tray. Open, closed, open, closed, like she was gulping air.
‘Oh,’ she finally said, before rushing off, to the washroom or something – I didn’t see her again. I still don’t know who she was. Her chair remained empty all night, and whenever I looked at it, I wanted to laugh. It was funny, really: a literal instantiation of my isolation. Like my infertility was creating a force field around me. Suddenly the distance I felt from my outside friends snapped into sense: infertility has a lot of power.
When TV and movies want to underscore an infertile female character’s isolation, they send her to an oblivious friend’s baby shower. But in my digital support groups, a more common scenario is that we do not get invited to baby showers; in fact, our friends who are pregnant or parenting small children begin avoiding us altogether. Infertile women will often find out about our friends’ and even relatives’ pregnancies, baby showers, and births on Facebook, after the fact. Writing on pregnancy loss, American sociologists Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz Rothman identify this isolation as the primary theme in all literature on miscarriage: ‘Bereaved mothers say, again and again, no one wanted to hear, no one let me talk, no one listened, no one said “I’m sorry.” It happened in silence.’
Discussing the topic in her excellent Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America, anthropologist Linda L. Layne quotes a woman whose experiences are typical:
[P]eople shied away either because they didn’t know what to say or because it could be a reality for them that they couldn’t deal with … [F]eelings of loneliness … began to sink in. People who knew what had happened either ignored me or said something inappropriate.
Feeling