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?
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.
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.”
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