In Sunday’s New York Time’s, Jennifer Gilmore writes a compelling story about coming to know the generosity of her fellow New Yorkers. How? A fertility med drug deal with women whose health insurance plans happen to cover the “outrageously expensive fertility medications” she needs to inject herself with to try to get pregnant.
I admit I was touched by Gilmore’s essay; I was happy that she found a way to beat the system and get her hands on fertility hormones her health insurance should have covered in the first place.
“We knew what brought us here, the number of in vitro procedures we’d undergone and whether our bodies had responded well to the unthinkable amount of hormones we’d shot into them,” Gilmore writes. “We knew the grade of our surgically retrieved eggs, and whether they had been perfect little chickens, fertilizing properly.”
But it was scarcely a month ago that Alex Kuczynski’s rent-a-womb surrogacy article graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine, a story that similarly started with her discussion of fertility meds; in Kucsynski’s case, she was able to afford the tens of thousands of dollars for I.V.F.
Enough with these infertility stories that reinforce tired tropes about middle-class, thirtysomething women so “desperate to have a child.” My apparently rotting 29-year-old eggs start to shrivel with each cautionary tale.
Photo by Pete Barr-Watson via Flickr.
Rachel Inbar - FertilityStories
