#The fear of the empty womb

Ashtaputre saubhagyavti bhava

This ancient Sanskrit blessing is bestowed on every young Hindu girl at sometime in her life. Even my liberal father whose faith in religion is tenuous, used to jokingly bless me with this wish when I bent down to touch his feet at our annual Diwali celebration. 

But I still remember very clearly how almost thirty years to the day, my first miscarriage. It was the end of the first trimester. Even though I didn’t really want a child so soon after marriage, I was more scared that after this one miscarriage I may just not be able to carry another child to full term.

Till I actually had my baby a year later the fear of being infertile loomed over my head like the sword of Damocles.

There are a lot of couples I know in my extended family circle who are childless and the possibility of me joining their ranks was real because 1 in 4 couples is infertile.

According to the WHO , for a woman, infertility (or a state of subfertility) can manifest itself as either:

• the inability to become pregnant
• an inability to maintain a pregnancy
• an inability to carry a pregnancy to a live birth.

When men and women attempt to have a child or to expand their family, the causes and the difficulties encountered can be complex. Many simple, as well as more complex medical interventions can be attempted to help a couple or an individual to reach a state of pregnancy or to be able to maintain a pregnancy which results in a live birth.

#An Indian obsession

I am one of the many Indian women who’ve had people come up to me and ask within months of getting married , “so when’s the good news? “. (Nudge , nudge, wink ,wink)

I foolishly believed my father when he used to joke that only in Hindi movies did the heroine get pregnant at the very first shot . I was astounded when I became pregnant in between contraceptive choices. And when  I miscarried in the first trimester I could see the concern in my mother’s eyes. Would I be infertile like some of the aunts in our family?

I had my girls in embarrassingly quick succession and often joked that I would conceive with  the mere thought !

But other women are not so lucky.

We, in India are obsessed with children.

This is basically a hangover from our primarily agrarian society  where fertility and fecundity played an important part.    This also held true In the pre-industrial era where disease was rife and the lifespan was around 35 years for men.

However , with prosperity, education and female empowerment population growth rates have slowed down .

  #Stigma, ostracism & solutions

Sadly in a country like ours which is grossly over populated, women without children face social ostracism and are often denied the right to “bless” a child at ceremonial occasions. They are excluded from other baby related events too for fear that they may bring ‘bad luck’.

This social exclusion has far reaching effects on a woman’s self esteem and mental health. Often it leads to depression and even loss of productivity with several trips to the doctors, charlatans or temples in order to have a child!

Well meaning relatives and neighbours will offer advice on how to beat fertility – right from praying to various deities and scientific solutions. 

My little girl once asked why Auntie X had no babies. Too little to be told otherwise, I told her that she didn’t pray hard enough. I had quite forgotten about this explanation and was confounded when she told me that Aunty P must have been praying all the time because she had 6 children! 

But fertility is more than just praying for children. My daughter Anna Shetty who has assisted in several IVF procedures has told me how painful the whole process is. Both physically and emotionally. Suddenly a woman’s reproductive health becomes public knowledge and everyone from the peons in the office to neighbourhood aunties seem to know every last detail of her ovulatory cycle etc.

[Tweet “Infertility is not a disease. It is a condition”].

And people suffering from this condition don’t want your pity, ostracism and advice.

All that they really need is empathy and acceptance.

This blog is to #SpreadAwareness about Infertility through Infertility Dost, India’s first website that facilitates couples to brave infertility with support and knowledge. You can find other links on Write Tribe.