Tag: infertility

A different NaPro story: Leah Libresco Sargeant speaks on loss and kindness

Last week, during Infertility Awareness Week, I published an interview with a woman who was served very poorly by her NaPro doctor. He failed her medically and caused her unnecessary physical and psychological harm. 
 
Leah Libresco Sargeant had a very different experience. Sargeant, 31, was married in 2016 and has one living child, Beatrice, who is 15 months old. Before Beatrice was born, Sargeant lost six babies. 
 

Those children are named Robin, Ariel, Blaise, Casey, Camillian, and Luca. Her third pregnancy was a possible ectopic, after which she began seeing a NaPro doctor. She then had a very early loss, sometimes referred to clinically as a ‘chemical pregnancy,’ and two more ectopic pregnancies before conceiving and carrying Beatrice to term. 

These are not dueling interviews, and they are not mirror images of each other. I wanted to share both women’s stories to give the conversation around NaPro more depth and nuance, because it’s so often presented in Catholic circles as a miracle cure, and entirely different from what mainstream fertility doctors can offer. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it  isn’t.

As Sargeant says,”Both stories are true. It’s a reason for people to hold Catholic doctors to a high standard of charity, as well as ethics. It’s not an unreachable standard.” 
 
Here is our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity:
 
A lot of people lose their first babies. When did you become aware that what you were dealing with was out of the ordinary?
 
 With our first baby, Robin. I didn’t care if it was out of the ordinary or not. People would say things like, “Your odds are good if you try again,” but who cares? Our baby just died. Nobody would say that if your baby got hit by a car. For each of our pregnancies, we focused on the risk to this baby, rather than thinking of it on some abstract level. 
 
After Blaise [the third loss] it was only partly that we were looking for a NaPro doctor. We were looking for a doctor who was a kind person, which wasn’t how we felt about the two doctors we had seen before. It felt like they didn’t see our babies as babies. They barely saw us as people.
 

When we came in for the last ultrasound, we suspected we had lost the baby by that point, and right before [the doctor] came into the room, I heard her say, “Okay, so there’s nothing there?” And they were brusque with us when we were crying in the waiting room. I’m sure it’s uncomfortable for people to see that, but what did they think was going to happen? It felt as though they had never delivered the news of a miscarriage before. You’re surprised by this? 

Even if it didn’t make any improvement in our medical treatment, [having a Catholic doctor] would mean someone who would take our losses seriously. 

How did you go about finding such a person?

We were in New York City, and we were in a Frassati Group for young married and engaged couples, and they said Dr. Nolte and the Gianna Center was really good. 
 
She took a very exhaustive NaPro history with a dozen blood tests, testing every possible hormone. She also asked about all our miscarriages, and when she took notes, she wrote down the babies’ names in the charts. I spoke to her recently, and she wanted to make sure she had accurately transferred all their names. 
 

So it sounds like this is one of those geographical things. Elizabeth had to drive four hours to get to a NaPro doctor, but you had a choice. 

 

Yes,  just walked across town. It was a 30 minute walk, and there was a park nearby. 
 
How did you first hear of NaPro? 
 
I had heard about in general. I took it with a grain of salt, the same as with people who say NFP is the best possible thing for your marriage, and whatever problem you have, NFP will solve it. 
 

It’s hard to make really strong promises, because women’s health is so under-researched. It’s important not to overpromise, not because the science is unsound, but because women’s health is always under-researched. Progesterone may be helpful. Depending on [your underlying condition] ,some studies have found yes, some have found no. It depends on what the nature of the fertility problem is. It’s certainly plausible it could save the life of some babies, but it’s not a given.

We talked about the side effects of medications, and whether it’s worth the chance to try it. I didn’t notice any side effects of taking progesterone, so there was very little down side of taking it. It might help, and it wasn’t difficult to take it. She said we could always come back and discuss how it was progressing. 

The thing that was most difficult was that it was a lot of different pills to take. It was depressing taking a little pill canister around, taking things at every meal, and having that be a reminder of how hard this was for us. 
 
Did you ever sit down and discuss what the parameters would be, how far you would go, what you would try? 
 
It would  have been something we would have evaluated if we had been [pursuing treatment] over a longer period of time. But we did keep getting pregnant. It was, “Is this baby going to make it?” It wasn’t this long, undifferentiated slog. 
 
You mentioned in an interview that, pre-conversion, you found some appeal in the gnostic idea that the “real you” is housed in the body; and in another essay that NFP did some work to heal that. I wonder if having struggles with your body not “functioning” right awoke that struggle at all. 
 
It’s been a long and continuing conversion of heart. There’s a difference between teaching women that their cycle has a structure, versus teaching as though there is no cycle, there’s just periods, and it’s a problem, and here’s how to manage it. That bodies are basically bad, but you can stay ahead of them if you work hard.  [Although, with some situations with NFP,] it can feel like your body is sending you signals from a distance, and it’s foggy. It’s not as though NFP is a magic bullet. 
 
A lot of women struggling with fertility problems talk about feeling like their bodies are broken, or that they betrayed them. 
 
I didn’t feel that way. Although a lot of medical terminology pushes in that direction. “Miscarried” sounds like you were carrying the baby, but you screwed up. “Losing the baby” makes you feel like, “Did I take my eye off the baby? Somehow I lost him.” A lot of language circles around blame. I didn’t have this [particular] problem, but “incompetent cervix” [is another example]. It’s not like you personally went cervix shopping and picked out one with a bad expiration date. 
 
A lot of medical language ticks me off. It sounds like it’s a woman’s fault. [My doctor wrote on my chart] “early loss,” rather than “chemical pregnancy.” Part of what happened was I felt like my body was doing the best job it could.
 

It was personally comforting for me [that I didn’t have to have a DNC]. I got take care of my baby till the end. It could be in my family without involving aggressive medical attention. 

With Camillian, it was an ectopic pregnancy. The blood tests started getting bad, and when we went in for the ultrasound, we were steeling ourselves to hear that the baby had died. But we got told the baby was in the wrong spot and had probably already died, based on the lack of heartbeat and how far along we should be. That really changed things. We were in the doctor’s office in New York, and they said, “You need to go to the hospital.” We took a train to New Jersey [so as to avoid] a surgeon who had been unkind to us. 
 
It was one thing to lose the baby, and for the baby to leave on their own time, but the idea that they were going to take the baby really upset me. The sense of peace I had with the other babies, I couldn’t feel with Camillian. It didn’t feel like it was happening on God’s time table or on the baby’s time table. 
 
Dr. Beiter had just met us. He hadn’t know us before. But he also stopped and talked through all our options. It was a Catholic hospital. Because the baby had already died, we had more options than is sometimes the case. We wanted to know how can we take care of the baby, even if the baby has died?
 

We didn’t like methotrexate very much as an idea. It would have been licit, but I didn’t like the idea of dissolving the baby. You have to wait longer, and it doesn’t always work. 

[The doctor said,] “You could avoid surgery; isn’t that better? You can go home today, and possibly just be done.” We talked it through, and he definitely had a preference for the drug, but he talked through what we preferred. Both options were morally fine and medically effective, and we made the call, and he took good care of us. 

Surgery is a harder recovery. It was locking in a harder recovery, but we wouldn’t expect to go back for another treatment. [With methotrexate, the symptoms of the drug can be similar to those of a tubal rupture, so you may have to go back to the ER.] I just wanted to go home and be done with everything, even if I’m recovering from abdominal surgery.  
 

That’s a tough thing with not just fertility medicine, but with medicine generally. Sometimes things are black and white, but sometimes there are different degrees of benefit and side effects, and there isn’t a single right decision. 

Did you ever receive any specific medical treatment from NaPro doctors that a mainstream fertility doctor would never have offered?

 

It’s hard to know for sure. Some mainstream doctors won’t consider progesterone at all, but my original doctor tested and had me supplement. There were tests that a doctor might have done later that our NaPro doctor didn’t need to wait for many many losses to do. None of them came through, but if I’d had a clotting disorder, I would have been very grateful for her being up to check.

The big (evidence not fully in) treatments we had were metformin for PCOS, and antibiotics for endometritis (which is different from endometriosis). Both of which, from my review of the literature, don’t have enough evidence behind them to make them an obvious right choice. But they have plausible mechanisms of action and (for me) mild to no side effects.

Did you ever have to deal with Catholics judging you for family size or for not having a honeymoon baby? 
 
We’ve been pretty open about our losses. Anyone who knew us enough to ask would know. Sometimes strangers will see Beatrice and say, “Is she your first?” I usually say “She’s our first to make it to birth.” Just because it’s true. 
 
Despite your good experience with Catholic doctors, is there anything you would like to see changed about the culture around NaPro or the conversation around Catholic fertility issues in general?
 

It’s good to remember that there’s not necessarily anything there to be fixed. [Sometimes people speak] in terms of something secretly wrong with you, and NaPro can fix it. We still don’t know for sure. We really don’t know if there was an underlying problem, or if we were just unlucky. 

If you feel like every person’s story ends by finding and fixing a problem, you can get emotionally blackmailed, by yourself, even. “I must have a really secret, obscure problem!” I saw that a bit in the miscarriage support group I was in. For the most part, it was really helpful, but [people would go to extreme lengths like] really aggressive elimination diets. I think people do that because they’ve tried everything, and it hasn’t happened, so they have to look harder for what’s wrong. 

God does make people who don’t have children, because that’s His really exhausting will for them, and not because His will is that they find and fix anything. It’s not comfortable, but it is true. That means people who do fertility care have to talk about the theology of suffering, not just aspirational fixing. 
 

One thing that helped me is that I have a friend who’s a Dominican sister who cares for people who are fatally ill with cancer. That’s their charism: They care for indigent people who cancer who wouldn’t otherwise have anyone to care for them. Not to cure them, but to care for them. That’s what my job was as a mother. 

Can you say more about that?
 
Some moms get to take care of their babies for the mom’s whole life. That’s not what I got to do. Instead, I got to take care of them for their whole lives. 

To care for them without the hope of curing them: That could be my work as a mother. 

Hopefully it’s because He trusts me with them. “I’m going to give you this baby who’s going to die. I’m entrusting you to love this baby in the way that baby needs to be loved, not the way you want to love that baby.”
 
And I worried, what if I get really good at this and God only wants me to do that? 
 
Is there anything we didn’t cover that you’d like people to know about your experience, or about infertility in general?
 
Sometimes people weren’t sure what to say to us. Trying to get us not to be sad is a lousy approach, but a common one. They didn’t say “Don’t be sad” out loud, but that is what they were saying quietly. If you could say quietly “Don’t be sad” in front of what you’re going to say, don’t say it. It’s better if you could say “I’m sad, too” quietly. 
 
What I wanted to hear was, “I’m sorry I won’t get to meet your baby. I would have liked to meet your baby.” 
 
 
***
 
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of two books, Arriving At Amen and Building the Benedict Option, and she runs a Substack called Other Feminisms: Creating a culture that values interdependence over autonomy. 
 

Sometimes NaPro is a miracle cure for infertility. Sometimes it’s a nightmare.

Elizabeth Dye never got an apology.
 
She and her husband had gone to a NaPro fertility care doctor looking for help. She’d had a honeymoon baby, then a second trimester loss, then an ectopic pregnancy. Everyone told them that NaPro doctors are the ethical, humane answer to fertility problems, so they drove four hours to see what help there was.
 
Dozens of tests, drugs, shots, and procedures later, she got pregnant again: A second ectopic pregnancy, in the same disfigured tube her doctor chose to leave intact despite her request to remove it. 
 
Fifteen years and seven surgeries later, Dye finally got a medically necessary hysterectomy this year for a condition her NaPro doctor missed. He not only didn’t heal her infertility, he caused her and her husband unspeakable sorrow, stress, and pain.  
 
She agreed to share her story during Infertility Awareness Week because it’s so common for Catholics to tell anyone suffering from infertility, “Try NaPro!” 
 

Sometimes that’s good advice. For many women, NaPro technology is literally an answer to prayer. NaPro touts itself as a cheaper, more effective, morally sound alternative to IVF, and some NaPro sites boast a success rate of “up to 80%.” Sometimes the care women receive allows them to conceive and sustain a pregnancy when nothing else worked; and many women say that, after IVF failed them, they felt treated as a whole person for the first time.

But there are other stories.

Couples with stories like Elizabeth’s often keep quiet, because they’re afraid of discouraging hopeful couples, or because they’re leery of damaging the reputation of a fertility system that presents itself as the medical face of the Catholic church — or because people simply don’t want to hear stories without happy endings. 

But it serves no one — and often leads to greater heartache — to paint an overly rosy picture of what couples should expect when they try NaPro.

Here is our conversation. 
 
***
 
How did you first become aware you had fertility issues, and how did you address them?
 
I didn’t think I would have any trouble because my daughter was conceived on our honeymoon. She was a textbook pregnancy and textbook delivery, a four-hour labor. We thought we were good to go, and we were going to have a bunch of babies. I got pregnant when she was about fifteen months old, and that ended up to be a second trimester loss, a little girl. Pathology said they couldn’t find any anomalies, and it was just a fluke. 
 
We weren’t trying to get pregnant, but we were using the stupid sympto-thermal method that never works for anybody. And that turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, which was really mismanaged by my traditional doctor and by a hospital. My tube wasn’t removed. I was treated with a chemo drug. The baby was already dead, so it’s a folate antagonist so it shrivels the fetus. She didn’t follow the protocol with the drug, so I had to have several doses, which you’re not supposed to have, and it left the tube really disfigured. 
 

We were hesitant to try to have any more children. My doctor thought maybe I had endometriosis, and we didn’t want to try for another baby if it was going to happen again. So everybody kind of steered me toward NaPro medicine. 

So we went to NaPro and told [the doctor] everything. He scheduled me for exploratory surgery. He’s about four hours away. Everything looked really great. There was no endometriosis, no sign of PCOS. But I told him if anything looks like a liability for a future ectopic pregnancy, please take it out. 
 
The right tube was horribly disfigured. It looked like sausages when they’re in a link, where it’s twisted. He told me he left it in because he felt he could resection it if something were to happen with my left tube. I wasn’t happy with that. 
 
So we went ahead with the charting, and everything that was required. I had to go to the hospital every day for an entire cycle and have my blood drawn and have it spun out and returned to me. I had a freezer full of blood. At the end of the cycle, it would get shipped to NaPro on dry ice, and he would look at my hormones. It was time-consuming and expensive. My insurance company didn’t want to pay to have my blood drawn and spun out and given back to me. 
 
We also had to do a sperm analysis, but you can only do it with perforated condoms, and they have to have it at the lab within thirty minutes of doing the deed, so that was a great experience to have to run that to the lab. 
 
They never really found anything major. My periovulatory estrogen could be a little higher, but there was no smoking gun. So they put me on fertility drugs to try to conceive. 
 
When we started fertility treatment, they don’t tell you how badly they’re going to make you feel. The debilitating anxiety; all the stuff you can imagine when you start messing with stuff on a fundamental level. So I did fertility drugs, I did Clomid, I did HCG shots to trick my body into thinking it was pregnant, to make more estrogen and progesterone. I did intramuscular injections. And I did get pregnant. 
 
Because I had had a previous ectopic pregnancy, I needed to have labs sent every 48 hours to make sure the HCG doubled, and it did. Everything looked great. And when I went in for my ultrasound, there was a perfect baby, in my right tube. The tube the doctor swore nothing could get through, that was completely sealed off and nothing could get in. 
 
It actually ruptured just prior to surgery. I had an abdomen full of blood. I had the right tube removed, finally. 
 
He told me I could try again next cycle. I tried again, I got pregnant, and I miscarried at about seven weeks naturally. 
 
Through all of it, I don’t think my experience was any different than most women who go so a secular, mainstream fertility doctor. They are pushing a product. Their endgame is to get you a baby. They don’t talk about things like how it’s going to affect you, and I think [the NaPro doctor] was willing to continue treatments after that second miscarriage, after such a short period of time. I lost so much blood, and I still had to go have blood draws to make sure my HCG was going down. At one blood draw, I just flat out hit the floor, passed out. I was put through the wringer, and he was like, “Just have one period and we’ll try again.”
 
When you’re on that rollercoaster, it’s really hard to get off. You’re basically hormonally not culpable, almost. You make decisions you wouldn’t make if you weren’t jacked on all these hormones. It’s like crack. You might as well be on a totally illicit drug, they are so powerful. 
 
I wish my husband and I had sat down and set really clear parameters for  how far we would go, because once you’re started, it’s so hard to get off. I’d be on an intramuscular progesterone that would jack me up to third trimester hormones, and then tank after that. It was like having a baby every month .
 
They did so many different things to me, it was just throwing stuff up against the wall to see what would stick. They couldn’t find a smoking gun. I felt like a guinea pig. He did say, “We’re still learning, this is still new, we’ve had success with a few patients” with this and that. I felt like I was learned on. 
 
I was very resentful he didn’t remove the tube when I asked him to, if there was something wrong with it. I had a major depressive episode after having been on and off and on and off progesterone so much in such a short period of time. My husband said we would never go there again. Even if I were to get pregnant again, I would never supplement with progesterone. They had never proved there was a deficiency, and my mental health couldn’t handle it. No on asked me if I was prone to depression and anxiety. He just pushed, “This is what I need you to do if you’re going to try to have a baby.” [Using] licit methods doesn’t make them appropriate. They’re pushers.
 
I imagine it to be the same exact experience with [traditional mainstream] fertility doctors. They would have just kept going.
 
The last time I saw him was when I went into the OR, and he was so shocked [the tubal pregnancy] had happened. He said over and over that in 23 years, he’s never seen anything like it. My numbers had risen perfectly. He was so sure. He never apologized. He never said, “I should have taken that tube out.” He never said he was sorry. 
 
It was horrible. I remember the ultrasound like I was not in my body. I can see myself sitting in the chair, and them showing me the heartbeat, and knowing the pregnancy had to be terminated. I’m grateful it ruptured, because the baby died naturally. 
 
It happened because he knew better. He knew better than I did. And it was my body. I asked him to take out the tube if it was a liability, but he knew better. He thought possibly he could fix it. 
 
[NaPro] was presented as medically superior. They say they try to get to the root cause and really find out what’s going on, instead of just throwing people on Clomid. They did try to get to the root cause, but they still threw me on Clomid. You have to learn the Creighton method for them to see you, and that wasn’t cheap, to go through an instructor. A lot of this was out of pocket, especially to travel four hours away. My husband works for our hospital, and they’re basically self-insured. If you need surgery, they want you to have it there. They only paid a small portion. I ended up having to have two surgeries out of state. 
 
A few months after that, because of all the hormones I had been on, my gall bladder went kaput, and I had to have gall bladder surgery. I had three major abdominal surgeries in a year. 
 
When did it occur to you that NaPro wasn’t matching up to the hype?
 
After I got away from it. There was a part of me that knew from the get-go that someone who’s willing to schedule me for surgery without even seeing me first is kind of strange. They scheduled me for surgery and I had my first visit with him 48 hours before. That’s the standard practice. 
 
I used to be in a Yahoo group with a NaPro Catholic group, and it was full of really desperate women. it was so sad. They just kept going on with the next surgery and the next round and ovarian resections and endo removed from their bowels in an attempt to try to have a baby.  If this is supposed to be so ethical, I don’t understand why these doctors don’t say, “Maybe you should think about adoption. Do you really want to go forward?” People are going to Omaha and shelling out thousands and thousands of dollars, that could be better spent on an adoption agency. 
 
It’s really rough on a marriage, too. This was thirteen, fourteen years ago. It took a lot of healing. It took a long time for my husband to be at peace with us not having more children. They can never really understand what we go through in having babies, in carrying a person, in having that connection. They can never really understand. There’s a part of me that feels sad or sort of resentful, because he really doesn’t get the way I suffered to try to give him another baby, to have another baby. That lingers. Sometimes I felt like he thought I didn’t really give it the old college try. I almost died twice, and I had all these surgeries. When you die, I tell him, you’re gonna know, and then you’re gonna feel like shit. 
 
They should be counseling couples, maybe asking them, “How’s your marriage doing?” If your marriage is shit by the time you get this baby, what good is it? I know there are plenty of women in this forum who probably did get their baby, but their marriage was destroyed.
 
Have you felt pressure from Catholics to be positive about your experience? 
 
For a little while. The further I got away from it, the more realistic I was with people. Every experience is different. They might get a good NaPro doctor. I can’t speak universally. Some women have had a super easy fix and have gone on to have all these babies. Those are the poster children they use. Most women do not, and they are on the same rollercoaster and the same drugs as the women who do IVF or IUI are on. 
 
It’s almost like an unspoken attitude that since you’re doing it God’s way, you’re gonna get a baby. I kind of felt like that. We’re going to such great lengths, surely He’ll bless us with a child. And He did bless me with two more children. They’re just not here. 
 
Have you been made to feel like a second rate Catholic because you don’t have a giant family? 
 
I struggle with this weekly, being part of the Catholic homeschool community where four kids is a small family. I’m sure everybody thinks we’re contracepting so we can can have a fabulous vacation every summer. People have told me, “You don’t even actually have a real family; you only have one kid.” It’s really hard to see a lot of pregnant women in our co-op. I don’t want another baby, but it’s like women doesn’t realize how amazing it is that your body just does what it’s supposed to do. Your body can grow people so easily. It’s just a miracle, when I see it with other people. I wish I had cherished my pregnancy with my daughter more. I would have relished it more if I had known. 
 
And you’re still using NFP now?
 
We use Marquette now, a sort of abbreviated Marquette using mostly Lh strips. 
 

Do you notice a difference in culture between Creighton and Marquette?

It seems less judgmental. It’s being used to avoid more than to achieve, and there’s more support for that. It seems more open to the reasons people would need to avoid, versus the idea that you should just keep having babies until your uterus falls out. Serious reasons are mental health, physical health, my marriage. I need to be a wife and a mom. I need to be alive. 

 
I do have difficulty finding an OB/GYN who will take me as a patient, because I had two ectopic pregnancies and I won’t contracept. That’s another “gift” that’s been given to me by NaPro. It’s forced me back to NaPro. Last summer, I was under so much stress that my period stopped, so I needed to go on progesterone. The NaPro doctor gave me twice as much as was necessary, twice as much as they even give pregnant women. It spurred a big depressive episode. 
 
They kept me on HCG shots for a year after I stopped fertility treatment, because they said it would continue to raise my progesterone and estrogen naturally. I had terrible heartburn. I had to have an endoscopy, and the meds weren’t working. I finally thought that maybe tricking my body into thinking it’s pregnant every blessed month maybe isn’t the best thing to do for my body. I stopped, and the heartburn went away. There were a lot of things like that. 
 
And I cannot get life insurance, unless I get my tubes tied. 
 
What kind of changes would you like to see?
 
If they looked at us like people, and not just a hormone profile. It was so very clinical. I don’t feel we were looked at like people. 
 
Do you still believe in NFP?
 
I do believe in NFP, in general. It has made my marriage stronger. We’ve had to grow as people. It has made us less selfish. We’ve had so much more abstinence than the average couple, because we haven’t had any pregnancies. I would say it’s hard, but worth it. 
 
I don’t feel conflicted. After my experience with hormones, I do believe hormonal contraception is bad. [Women on hormonal contraception] are probably feeling crazier than they need to. I’m pretty open about the fact that we use NFP and it works well for us. 
 
***
 

POSTSCRIPT:

This interview is from 2019. Dye has since undergone a medically necessary hysterectomy — her seventh surgery. The condition that necessitated surgery was not diagnosed by her NaPro doctor.

Dye said:
 

“Not gonna lie, the absence of NFP has been a game changer. The amount of space it takes up in your head is phenomenal — especially if your cycles go off in the weeds, like mine. It’s not that we’re really having more sex or better sex, it’s just the mental burden was so tremendous and I didn’t realize how tremendous.”

***

NOTE: I’m in the process of preparing an interview with a Catholic woman who had a very different experience with NaPro. 

 

***

Image by Zadrien50 from Pixabay

NFP Awareness Week: Clearblue Fertility Monitor Giveaway #1 and #2

Here we are again! NFP Awareness Week. Here’s the deal: We love the Marquette method of NFP. It’s made NFP so much easier and has given us so much more confidence. And, like, Corrie is almost three-and-a-half and she is still the youngest, so.

But the monitor costs more than $100, and you have to buy a box of test strips every few months, too. For many years, we just couldn’t afford it, and I know plenty of people are in the same boat.

Happily, I have many generous friends, and ten of them have offered to sponsor a total of eleven monitors to give away, plus several boxes of test strips, plus instruction with one or possibly two instructors!

 

Today, we have two sponsors, each sponsoring a monitor and box of test strips to give away. One is my friend Tanya Cleary, and the other is an anonymous donor. Thanks so very much to them!

For my part, I will try to post a new, terrible graphic each day this week. It’s not easy, but I’m willing.

Today’s raffle is open only to US residents. There will be one prize for UK residents and one for Australia residents in the coming days.

The raffle details:

How do I enter? Use the Rafflecopter form below. It gives you several ways to enter. If the form doesn’t show up, click on the link that says “a Rafflecopter giveaway” at the bottom of the post. Only one prize per household.

How often can I enter? You may enter once per day, using as many ways of entering as you like (see form below for details). Two winners will be chosen per day. Each day is a separate raffle. Each raffle runs from midnight to midnight, eastern time.

Can I win if I live outside the US? Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are open only to US residents. On Thursday, there will be one prize for a US resident and one for a UK resident; and on Friday, there will be one prize for a US resident and one for an Australia resident.

When will winners be announced? I’ll choose two winners each day on Monday through Friday. I’ll announce all the winners on Friday, or possibly on Saturday if I am a terrible person.
If you are a winner, I will notify you using the address you provided to Rafflecopter.

Do I have to provide my actual email address, even though I worry that you will use it to steal my soul and then go on a shopping spree at Forever 21? Yes, please use an actual email address. I don’t even want your soul. Your valid email is the only way I have of getting in touch with you if you win, so please make sure that when you sign up for Rafflecopter, you use an active address! If I can’t get in touch with you, I’ll pick a different winner.

 

If the Rafflecopter form doesn’t show up below, here’s the link to enter.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

IVF jewelry and the scandal of sentimentality

Last week, pop science entertainer Bill Nye set off a wave of righteous indignation by asking, “Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?”

The only response is, of course: What the hell do you mean, ‘extra?'” What is an extra child? Who is disposable and extraneous, and who gets to decide? Are you “extra,” Bill Nye? Am I?

Last night, I saw for myself what an extra child looks like. An Australian company called Baby Bee Hummingbirds will take your extra, unused IVF embryos, preserve and cremate them, and then encase them in resin as “keepsake jewelry.”

The founder asks, “What a better way to celebrate your most treasured gift, your child, than through jewellery?”

Well, you could let him live, I suppose. You could allow him the basic dignity of spending time in the womb of his mother, to live or not, to grow or not, but at least to have a chance. You could celebrate the life of your child by giving him some small gift of warmth and softness, however brief, rather than letting him travel in an insulated pouch from lab to lab, frozen and sterile from beginning to end. You could conceive a child so as to give him life, and you could rise like a human should above the blind proliferation of biology.

I have not experienced the anguish of infertility. I can easily imagine how the ancient, unquenchable desire for a child would drive a couple to consider IVF. Who would fault a loving couple for wanting a child?

I can imagine, if I had no guidance, seeing IVF as a way of simply bowing to the inevitable awkwardness of life. We’d rather do things the natural way, but sometimes nature fails us. If science offers us a workaround, and we end up in a place of love, what does it matter? I can imagine thinking this. It is natural to want children.

And it is natural to want our children to remain with us even if we can’t hold their plump, warm baby bodies in our arms. We want something we can touch. I can imagine this: Knowing, no matter who thinks they’re just “extras,” that these embryos are more than just specimens. I can imagine wanting to keep them safe, or something like it.

And so the mother does the thing that makes the most sense to a pagan, when nature fails her: She bows to artifice, and finds a way to bring her children with her, clumsily, sentimentally, but grasping at something that seems true: We are made to be with the ones we love. We are supposed to be able to give them life, and to keep them safe.

She knows they are her children. But does she know what children are?

In order to turn embryos into jewelry, one must believe that all children, and all people, can be made safe. One must believe there is such a thing as safety in this world.

“It’s about the everlasting tangible keepsake of a loved one that you can have forever,” says the founder of the jewelry company.

But mothers, and fathers, and you barren ones, listen to me. You cannot have any loved one forever. Don’t you know that they all go? Don’t you know this?

Sometimes it happens before we even knew they existed; sometimes it happens when they are old and feeble, frightened and crying for death. But they all go. No one is safe. No one can be preserved. Why are you lying about it? Haven’t you been through enough springs to know that winter always comes? Haven’t we been through this? No one is with us always, until the end of time.

Anyway, hardly anyone.

Imagine, a body encased in glass, made portable, made consumable. But not jewelry. Instead, a sunburst, a fountain of life, a wellspring, the maker of worlds somehow contained, first in His mother’s womb, and now on our altars, through springs and winters and then through springs again.

The body inside is a willing victim. Not preserved in death, but alive forever, immortal. Here is the difference between the scandal of the Incarnation and the scandal of sentimentality. The Incarnation invites us to accept forgiveness, bought for us through His death. Sentimentality puts our sin always before us, but tells us we can be comforted through everlasting death.

I do understand. We want the body. We grieve when the beloved one is lost to us, even if, like the parents who make “extra” embryos, it’s entirely our fault that our children are cold and dead. We want to heal our grief, to control it, to contain it.

That is not how sin is healed. That is not how death is conquered. Healing comes when we send our dead to be with Him, not preserved forever in death, but to be restored forever in His life.

I commend all the dead, all my beloved ones who are passing away like the grass: Go and be with Him. You don’t need to stay here with us, to comfort me in my weakness. Go and be with Him.

***
Embryos image by ZEISS microscopy via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Monstrance image by Aleteia image department via Flickr (Creative Commons)

 

New Women’s Wellness and Fertility Center in NH includes NaPro surgeon (and they’re hiring!)

I keep forgetting to tell you! There’s a new women’s wellness and fertility center opening in Manchester, NH, right inside Catholic Medical Center. They offer standard OB/GYN services  and well woman exams, and their new doctor, Dr. Sarah Bascle, is a surgeon who is trained in NaProTechnology.

As you may know, NaPro is not only ethically sound for Catholics, but it often has a high rate of success treating women suffering infertility, repeat miscarriages, endometriosis, PCOS, and other fertility issues, bringing healing where standard medical procedures fail. NaPro isn’t magic, but it’s real medicine, not woo, and it can be life-changing.

The Women’s Wellness & Fertility Center of New England opens in winter of 2017, and they are now pre-registering patients. Check out their webiste here, or call 603.314.7595.

They are also still hiring for a few positions, including an experienced Certified Nurse Midwife. Here’s some more info about that.

Best of luck to them! Many couples will travel for hundreds of miles to work with a NaPRO-trained doctor, so I’m thrilled to finally have one in New Hampshire.

 

Why I don’t say “I’m so blessed.”

The other day, a woman lashed out at me for announcing my latest pregnancy online. This particular woman’s stock in trade is lashing out; and since I’m pretty sure I don’t (as she accused me of doing) parade my perfect children around like perfect trophies to prove that I’m a perfect Catholic mom, I didn’t give her anger much thought. Just another angry person on the internet.

Later, out of curiosity, I read more of her comments. And then my heart broke.

It was a lot of what I expected: You Catholic moms think you’re so great! You think I’m bitter, but I’m not! Who cares what you do with your stupid perfect lives! You think you’re happy, but you’re not!

You think that just because I don’t have any kids, God doesn’t love me!

Oh.

It was as transparent as a child who howls and screams that he is not tired, not tired at all. Only no one was going to come to this woman, pick her up, soothe her, and put her to bed. No one was going to say, “It’s all right, sweet one. I hear what you’re saying. Let me help you and give you what you need, so you will feel better.” She thinks that God doesn’t love her, because He didn’t give her any children.

It’s not true.  God loves you. But I don’t know how, just like I don’t know how or why or how much He loves me. He makes rain fall on the wicked and the just, and woe to the just who think that they deserve the rain.

This is not easy. When we love somebody and want to show them our love, we give them things – do nice things for them – make them feel our love in the way we know best. If I spent four months hunting for the perfect present for my husband, and he acted like it just randomly fell out of the sky because he’s a lucky fellow, I would be annoyed. No! I would think. I gave you that on purpose, to prove that I love you! This is personal!

And it is personal when God gives us good things.  But it’s not proof of His love, exactly. It’s not that simple. Yes, everything that is good comes from God, and He deserves our thanks and praise for the things He give us. But the problem comes when we look at His gifts and draw conclusions about ourselves.

This is why I rarely say, “God has blessed us” when I mean, “We have good things” — whether it’s things like the sunny little house where we live, or a car that keeps running one more year, or a happy weekend, or a living, breathing baby (or ten). I say, instead, “We’re so lucky.”

I mean that the good things that come to us are only the hem of the mystery of God’s goodness. They are only a rumblings in the outskirts of the real workings of the economy of grace. It is a very good thing to be grateful and to praise God for the things we receive. It is a monstrously bad thing to conclude that we got them as a reward for good behavior. And all too often, at least in the 21st century of the United States, that is how we use the word “blessing.”

Witness the blaspheming Osteens telling us,

To experience [God’s] immeasurable favor, you must rid yourself of that small-minded thinking and start expecting God’s blessings, start anticipating promotion and supernatural increase. You must conceive it in your heart before you can receive it. In other words, you must make increase in your own thinking, then God will bring those things to pass.

Tit for heavenly tat, in other words. Well, Jesus wasn’t small minded. Jesus’ Father loved Him, and look at Him. Look at Him:

PIC Grunewald cruxifix

 

 

This is why I do not say that I am blessed, even though I know that this is the word that is technically, theologically sound. I think it means something different to modern ears. I am afraid that it says something so loathsome that I don’t want to risk it.

If my happiness is a sign that God has blessed me, what does that equation say to people who aren’t experiencing “promotion and supernatural increase”? To the people whose house is washed away, whose husband is shot down, whose womb is barren? It says what my reader said, without knowing she was saying it:

God does not love me.

So I don’t say that I am blessed. Instead, I say that I am lucky to have all that I have, because it is closer to something that I cannot express:  in my best hours, my witless bafflement in the face of God’s mercy to me and my family. I am lucky, not because my good fortune has no meaning or no purpose or no design, but because I do not know why it happens. It happens because God loves me in this way at this time, when I am just and when I am unjust. I do not know why.

Why do I have, and why does she not have? I don’t know. It is easy for me to see that God loves me, because I am simple: I see that He has given me many things, and to my childish soul, that spells love. When I pray for other people, I often ask that He will bless them in obvious ways, that He will make it as clear as possible that they are loved. I suppose this shows some arrogance, telling God how to do His job. But really it’s fear.  I am afraid to learn more about the other kind of love.

Reader is looking for real-world account of infertility

From a reader:

question – do you know of a writer similar to yourself who writes from the perspective of infertility after having had kids.what i mean about a writer similar to yourself is that real world, humorous view of life & kids & God’s will. i need to read someone who writes from the perspective of someone who has had kids but is currently going through some kind of infertility but wants more kids but is struggling with God’s will in the matter. i don’t know if i’m making any sense. every writer i come across is all very holy & pious and “Imma offer everything up” and while I appreciate that view, it’s totally not me. I need someone who says, “Yes it sucks that I’m going through this and it sucks to try to live with God’s will in this.” haha. any suggestions? do you think your readers would have any suggestions?

Anyone?