Recently, the New York Times wrote an arti­cle about a new real­ity series that TLC began air­ing strictly on their web­site. “A Con­cep­tion Story,” a Web-​​only show fol­lows the lives of 6 women as they try to con­ceive over the next seven months. Which, see­ing that this is the same net­work that airs “A Wed­ding Story” and “A Baby Story,” makes per­fect sense.

Meet Kris­ten, one of the six women in “A Con­cep­tion Story”

I mean really … what bet­ter way to bridge the “gap” between the Wed­ding Plan­ning and the arrival of a new­born baby by film­ing a show about Fam­ily Planning?

No. Really … I’m not being sar­cas­tic. Even though at first I was hes­i­tant to watch the show, I must admit that curios­ity got the best of me. While it’s cur­rently just wrapped up it’s sec­ond month of video entries, I’m actu­ally invested in watch­ing these six women’s stories.

For those that were as skep­ti­cal (or per­haps jaded?) about watch­ing ecsta­tic BFP (“big fat pos­i­tive” … as in a pos­i­tive preg­nancy test) announce­ments via the web, I’ll spare you the heartache to let you know, as of today, there has been only one per­son who saw the two pink lines thus far. And it’s a cou­ple that had been been try­ing to con­ceive for close to three years.

Which is another thing. Out of the six cou­ples we’re ini­tially intro­duced to, half of them have been expe­ri­enc­ing dif­fi­culty try­ing to con­ceive. The oth­ers that are just “start­ing” their quest to have a baby (or add another one to their fam­ily); well, it would appear that they, too, may be find­ing out that get­ting preg­nant isn’t quite as easy as the rest of the world makes it seem to be. Or as easy as the prover­bial “birds and bees” the­ory that we were taught in school.

Speak­ing of the birds and the bees …

About two weeks ago, I stum­bled on another arti­cle in an Austin** news­pa­per. It’s this arti­cle that led me to this web­site and the humor­ous, but spot-​​on videos about a Bird and a Bee deal­ing with infer­til­ity. If you haven’t watched them, I urge you to do so, if only to empathize with what any infer­tile cou­ple can encounter.

Both “A Con­cep­tion Story” and the “Increase Your Chances” vignettes  (also spot­lighted in this arti­cle in Salon, an award-​​winning online news and enter­tain­ment Web site) are prob­a­bly one of the first real adver­tise­ments high­light­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties in try­ing to conceive.

The Bird and the Bee

And when I say “adver­tise­ments” in rela­tion­ship to the TLC story, I do mean adver­tise­ment. Because although the sto­ries being told in “A Con­cep­tion Story” are in “real time” (as evi­denced by the jour­nals that these women write for the show), the whole she-​​bang is spon­sored by First Response, whose prod­ucts focus on all aspects of preg­nancy plan­ning. And it’s quite evi­dent the moment you click on the TLC web­site for the show, that they’ve invested a lot of money into adver­tis­ing their products.

But get­ting back to these adver­tis­ing cam­paigns, it’s quite refresh­ing to know that there are com­pa­nies*** out there that are will­ing to go that in-​​depth with the emo­tional side of infer­til­ity. Because, face it: thus far, any adver­tise­ments for infer­til­ity I’ve heard were for Infer­til­ity Clin­ics or Hos­pi­tal Net­works. And it’s typ­i­cally only a 30– to 60-​​second spot.

Yeah; that’ll never be enough time to go into depth about the mul­ti­ple lay­ers of Infertility.

As happy as I am about Infer­til­ity get­ting its fair share of air time, it’s sad to see that other peo­ple still may not empathize with what an infer­tile cou­ple go through both phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally. All you have to do is look at some of the com­ments made in regards to such arti­cles that brought these ads to the forefront.

One per­son commented:

Couldn’t it be that if you can’t get preg­nant on your own that it means that god didn’t want you to have kids?

[Duh. Don’t think that I haven’t already thought about that. And oh, by the way … I believe if we’re talk­ing about one G*d, I believe it’s com­mon respect to address him/​her for­mally; not with a lower case “g.” I’m just saying … ]

While another per­son wrote:

The best way to become a par­ent is to chose to have your chil­dren dur­ing your most fer­tile years, not when you are old.

[Hmm … maybe some of us did choose to become par­ents when we were sup­posed to be most fer­tile? And so what if we started later in life? What does it mat­ter to you?]

And yet another per­son stated the obvious:

If you can’t have babies, why not just adopt?

[Because clearly adopt­ing a child is such a sim­ple task. And, unlike infer­til­ity treat­ments, there’s no finan­cial or emo­tional stress involved in the adop­tion process. NOT!]

But this one … for me, this one is the kicker of them all:

Infer­til­ity, espe­cially in devel­oped nations like the US, is prob­a­bly a good thing. I think it’s rep­re­hen­si­ble that big pharma and the med­ical com­mu­nity is encour­ag­ing peo­ple to have children.

That last state­ment is what prob­a­bly angered me the most. Even more than the “G*d didn’t mean for you to have kids” state­ment. To me, this state­ment has the poten­tial to dig deeper than the emo­tional tur­moil an infer­tile cou­ple can feel. As if feel­ing like fail­ure for not being able to repro­duce wasn’t bad enough … it is state­ments like that which can strip away any sense of sup­port that an Infer­tile can turn to out­side of the Adop­tion, Loss & Infer­til­ity (ALI) Community.

But that’s my own hum­ble opin­ion. Because really, when *I* look at both the “Increase Your Chances” adver­tise­ment and TLC’s “A Con­cep­tion Story” Web series, I don’t imme­di­ately think about run­ning to the first Infer­til­ity Spe­cial­ist I know. And I don’t make a mad dash to the drug store to pick up more Home Preg­nancy Tests.

No. The first thing I think of is that it’s about d*mn time that Infer­til­ity is get­ting its time in the spot­light. Just like Can­cer, Dia­betes, Coro­nary Artery Dis­ease … and pretty much every other health con­di­tion (Erec­tile Dys­func­tion any­one?) has.

Don’t you think this 24 & 25 yo new­ly­wed cou­ple deserved to have kids? We started try­ing about a year after our hon­ey­moon and kept try­ing for more than 10 years.

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**How much do you love me, Kate?

***EMD Serono, a Massachusetts-​​based maker of fer­til­ity drugs, spon­sors the Increase Your Chances campaign)

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Related Links:

TLC’s “A Con­cep­tion Story”

NYTimes Arti­cle

Increase Your Chances Website

The States­man Arti­cle (Austin Newspaper)

Salon e-​​News & Enter­tain­ment Article