My fifth time going through a fertility surgery was when it hit me that I might never have children. I was 39, and each cycle was the same: unsuccessful. My eggs — which I was told were both low quality and quantity — never even made it to the stage where they could be implanted back into me as the beginning of life.
I’d wanted children for years, less as a concrete goal than as a theoretical desire, something that I thought would happen once I found a partner I loved and managed my career. I found that partner, and we ultimately decided to go off birth control. And we waited. I took supplements, cut out red meat and urinated on ovulation sticks. Nothing happened.
Yet we were lucky; we had enough disposable income to try to have children through fertility treatments, something too many others can’t afford. And because of the racial wealth gap, this often means that those who cannot take this path are Asian, Black and Latinx — yet another manifestation of embedding inequalities into future generations. We can do better by requiring that insurance companies cover fertility treatments as part of regular coverage.
