NPR does infertility badly
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
Brenda Wilson’s Morning Edition story about infertility is quite a muddle of contrasting statistics that say that women are doing wrong and first-person accounts of women who say they are doing right by waiting to have kids. Where the story goes wrong is its focus on the fact that biology and culture make contrary demands on women. The more salient, important, and difficult story would have instead explored why or how women are pulled in such drastically opposite directions. Instead, we get hopeful pronouncements by Helen Fisher, who says that women are finding ways to have both family and career, and we get Wilson turning the implications of Fisher’s point into a dull assertion about passive social change: “Fisher… predicts that society will more fully accommodate women’s needs and biological realities.” In fact, society will not simply accommodate; rather, laws and policies that are friendly to women, men, and children will be advocated for, tested, enacted, reviewed, and fought over. Unfortunately, how those laws and policies are being pursued—which is to say, how society is changing—Wilson does not bother to say.
