Questions About Submission
My partner is sitting on our living room floor in a spot that’s been empty for months, a space where a couch will soon be. It’s probably not a great idea, he says lovingly, to look for empowerment in the American healthcare system or maybe even in this process in general. We’re going through our first round of IVF after two years of trying to conceive, including three rounds of intrauterine insemination.
The first two IUI attempts were at our home with an amazing midwife. The process felt empowering, queer and radical. She set up her vials and centrifuge on our kitchen counter while I stood over by the pantry with a Ball jar containing my partner’s precious jizz under my shirt and pressed against my chest – to keep it warm until showtime. The whole thing felt so natural and strong. The midwife’s teenage kid was waiting in her car outside for the forty minutes the whole process took; he’d been through this many times before, the kid of a traveling midwife. It was hilarious and awesome. I was so excited by the idea of getting pregnant from this.
The IVF process has felt like the opposite. While it’s an immense privilege to even have the option of IVF, it’s felt disempowering. It requires you to really submit. Submit to big things like the capitalist nature of our healthcare system and to having lots of unanswered questions about what you’re putting in your body and who’s making money off it. I’ve been internally resisting, and it doesn’t seem to be doing me any good.
And submit to smaller things like not getting more of a head’s up about stuff before it’s upon us. Basic things like, IVF takes about seven weeks (not like a normal menstrual cycle); you won’t know how much your insurance will/won’t cover until the whole process is nearly over; and you should put a pad in your underwear after the saline sonogram so you don’t get in an elevator full of people only to have the water come rushing out of your uterus and completely soak through your pants before you get to the first floor.
This journey has triggered a complex web of emotions and one in particular that feels so taboo that I hesitate to name: ambivalence. The IVF stuff has corroded my desire for pregnancy at all. This raises questions in my mind: Why is my personal relationship to pregnancy colored by the way I get there? The process of, in the words of our fertility clinic, “achieving” it? Does this mean there’s something wrong with me; does it make me a less-committed prospective parent and a flimsier, worse parent? Should I not be doing this at all?
Maybe by the time they implant a beautiful embryo into my uterus, I’ll feel released and empowered and ready for the next leg of this bewildering, human journey.
—Anonymous