Infertility: Worth a Closer Look
by Amanda Loder
When considering health crises facing the United States, what comes to mind are probably diseases, maybe breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and HIV and AIDS. What probably doesn't spring to mind immediately is infertility -- after all, by itself, it's not fatal. But consider this: In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 9.2 million women in the US had used infertility services at some point. That's about 12 percent of America's female population of childbearing age. Or, put another way, that's more than one out of 10 women between the ages of 15 and 44.

Compare that figure to:
- 2.5 million breast cancer survivors
- 5 million people with Alzheimer's Disease
- 1.2 million Americans with HIV
- and fewer than 1 million people with full-blown AIDS

Yet, despite the massive scale of infertility nationwide, it's a health issue on which much of the country remains silent. Spokane Infertility Support Group Founder Camilla Kane believes that infertile men and women still risk stigmatization for publicly admitting their childbearing difficulties. "I know a lot of people whose close friends and family members don't know they're dealing with infertility, so it's something we still feel ashamed about, something we don't talk about," Kane said, "In a way, that's not true about other diseases. If you tell someone you have cancer, there's some empathy and emotion, because…it could happen to me. But when we talk about infertility, they've either already had kids, and had them easily, or they just know it won't happen to them."

Artificial Reproductive Treatment, or ART, has existed in the US since 1981, following the birth of the first American baby conceived in vitro. Since then, numerous infertility treatments have become available, including harvesting and freezing a couple's eggs and sperm to allow for multiple attempts at creating and implanting an embryo, harvesting the woman's eggs to combine with donor sperm, using a donor's eggs, and even using a surrogate mother. Yet, despite advances in infertility treatments, successfully implanting an embryo is no guarantee of pregnancy, and even achieving pregnancy is no guarantee of a live birth. The CDC reports the most popular form of ART is harvesting fresh eggs from the prospective mother, fertilizing them outside the body, and implanting the new embryo. In 2005, just over one-third of those implantations, 34 percent, resulted in pregnancy. Of those pregnancies, 18 percent of the babies weren't born alive.

After using numerous methods to get pregnant, Kane's on her seventeenth fertility treatment in three and a half years. She's been pregnant three times before: her first pregnancy resulted in the live birth of a boy two months premature-he died within minutes due to complications from birth defects. The other two pregnancies were miscarriages. Now, Kane's best option for a full-term, live birth is using donor eggs. Although she said it was emotionally difficult, at first, knowing she wouldn't be genetically related to her child, Kane said found a donor-and a friend. "At first, I wanted a mini-me…if I could have found my magical twin, I would have," Kane said, "Once I got over the first couple weeks of that, I decided it really didn't make that much of a difference…I realized it wasn't really the details that mattered, and I figured, if I found somebody I could be friends with, you know, how you meet somebody at a party and just kind of hit it off? That's what I was looking for, and not so different in appearance that it was obvious that the child wasn't a genetic child of both of us."

At 40 years old, Kane's now nearly six months pregnant. Her story mirrors the stories of a sizable minority of Americans who desperately want to have a child, yet remain silent.