Mama-Wannabe's Gone Wild

Like a lot of folks on the same maillists I endure, I was a recent recipient of emails from the American Fertility Association about a recent taping of The Tyra Banks Show. The AFA was up in arms and in full advocacy mode after feeling duped by the show's producers into soliciting willing participants who were then customarily trampled by plants in the audience.

When I happened upon this recent news item (here on Revolution Health's website) about a fertility treatment cost analysis published in January's Fertility & Sterility, I couldn't help but think about the "Tyra Banks Show incident."

The study says that when using a woman's age and her FSH levels to calculate the probability of a live birth following ART, the calculated cost of that baby gets higher and higher. Astronomically. If the woman's predicted delivery rate is less than 10% using that formula, she's going to pay a lot more for a baby from her own egg cells than she would for one from donor eggs.

Word on the street (to date, no one's heard from the Tyra Banks Show producers, nor has the show been aired) is that the invited guests were women who were continuing forward with assisted reproductive technology long after what some think are reasonable attempts. Rather than it being a tear-jerking, empathy-gleaning feel-good event, it turned into a finger-pointing affair compleat with frustrated relatives of the patients who were led into confronting their loved ones with the heat of the moment.

Years ago, when I spoke by way of Internet day and night with thousands of people who were sad, mad, dismayed, and downhearted about not being able to get and stay pregnant, the vast majority of us knew -- even if it was too painful to openly discuss -- that in the end, something would have to give. I daresay that for most of us, the biggest straw breaking camels' backs was the financial one. We all knew, either directly or through the grapevine, of women who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and many, many years, not to mention the emotional and physical stress involved, on IVF procedures that numbered in the double-digits.

Physicians walk a very fine line with this issue. I applaud those who come right out and tell women that their best chances are donor eggs at some point, and suggest the patient might be better off either stopping treatment altogether or making that tough choice to use someone else's genetic material. On the other hand, I am impressed with the attempts made by so many older women (and younger ones who have wacky FSH for little to no discernible reason) who refuse to see their fertility strictly in medical terms, choosing instead to incorporate existential and even spiritual themes into their baby-making efforts.

As for Tyra Banks' show and producers -- that's just showbiz, folks.

Link: News - Revolution Health.