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"People had many reactions to the news last year that Katie Holmes was pregnant: happiness, bewilderment, shock. Me, I cried. My husband came home to find me curled up on our bedroom floor, whimpering and waterlogged, a stupid celebrity magazine clutched to my empty, empty belly. Katie&amp;amp;#8217;s baby, you see, was due about the same time as the one I had just miscarried. It had taken me 14 months to get pregnant, the last five of which were a flurry of blood tests, sonograms and hormone injections, some administered to my midriff by my husband after excusing ourselves briefly and mysteriously from dinner parties. Because I was 36 and the incidence of chromosomal abnormalities increases with age, we&amp;amp;#8217;d chosen to undergo chorionic villus sampling (CVS), an invasive diagnostic test available earlier than amniocentesis that carries a less than one percent risk of miscarriage. After the amniotic fluid gushed from between my legs in the hospital cafeteria a half-hour later, after a week of petrified bed rest, after the doctor, frowning at the ultrasound, murmured, &amp;amp;#8220;No fluid, no heartbeat,&amp;amp;#8221; we joined that one percent. The baby, test results later confirmed, had been perfectly healthy. Friends sent flowers, which were lovely and appreciated. Some, out of habit, signed their cards with their kids&amp;amp;#8217; names, which made me cry even harder. And then there was Katie. And Angelina. And Gwyneth. They got to watch their &amp;amp;#8220;bumps&amp;amp;#8221; grow after a doctor removed from mine the tiny being that would have been my baby. They got to shop for cute Liz Lange maternity camisoles while I had to slink, defeated, back to the fertility clinic. When they finally gave birth last spring, it was relatively speaking, a relief: It felt to me like they had all been pregnant for years. I know. I should not care about Katie or Angelina or Gwyneth. I should concentrate on my own wellness and nurture hope for the future. Should, yes. The problem is, the frenzy over pregnant celebrities is only one symptom of a larger phenomenon that&amp;amp;#8212;for fertile and infertile women alike&amp;amp;#8212;is nearly impossible to ignore: The world has become baby obsessed. &amp;amp;#8220;What we&amp;amp;#8217;re witnessing in our culture is a rampaging, almost hysterical fixation on pregnancy and babies and how having them will transform your life and allow you to reach nirvana,&amp;amp;#8221; says Susan J. Douglas, Ph.D., professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and coauthor of The Mommy Myth. &amp;amp;#8220;For infertile women, it&amp;amp;#8217;s like a giant megaphone of guilt and shame.&amp;amp;#8221; It&amp;amp;#8217;s not that people are having more kids; the national average is still two per family. It&amp;amp;#8217;s that kids seem to have become a Really Big Deal. You know what I mean: celebrity magazines featuring belly-bulge updates, designer diaper bags and million-dollar photos of Hollywood newborns. Fleets of tricked-out strollers blocking your way to a seat at Starbucks. Big-box stores with names that sound like commands (whose idea was Buy Buy Baby?). Cult cable TV shows like A Baby Story and Maternity Ward and fawning blogs like babyrazzi.com. Baby showers and kiddie parties with Spielberg-level production values. Stores displaying got baby? T-shirts and 7 for All Mankind $255 expandable-waist jeans. &amp;amp;#8220;You cannot escape the pressure to have a baby, not anywhere you look. The barrage is suffocating,&amp;amp;#8221; says Sabrina Paradis, 36, of New York City, who once cried when she opened her mailbox to find an unsolicited catalog for Pottery Barn Kids. &amp;amp;#8220;If you&amp;amp;#8217;re infertile,&amp;amp;#8221; she says, &amp;amp;#8220;the ideal would be to disappear off the face of the earth for a while and then come back pregnant.&amp;amp;#8221; To Sabrina, to me, to anyone who&amp;amp;#8217;s dealt with infertility, baby mania appears magnified. &amp;amp;#8220;Women going through infertility are in so much pain, they&amp;amp;#8217;re sensitive to any reminder of what they want and can&amp;amp;#8217;t have,&amp;amp;#8221; says Alice Domar, Ph.D., author of Conquering Infertility and founder of the Domar Center for Complementary Healthcare in Waltham, Massachusetts. &amp;amp;#8220;Women will come into my office and say to me, &amp;amp;#8216;I&amp;amp;#8217;m sick and tired of hearing about Angelina and her baby.&amp;amp;#8217; They can&amp;amp;#8217;t believe celebs bother them so much, and yet, they do.&amp;amp;#8221; Of course, to some extent, it&amp;amp;#8217;s a good thing for women that pregnancy has become a source of pride, not a nine-month condition to hide. And I surely would not want to trade places with my childless great-aunt Bessie, who had to cope with infertility before there was even a term for it, before there were treatments, technologies, books, support groups and Internet chat rooms that could make a difference. Still, baby mania is upon us. And I&amp;amp;#8217;ve had it with being its resentful victim. The depths of infertility despair Like many young women today, I was (thank goodness) raised to follow my dreams and expect success. I have published five books, won journalism awards, cocreated a popular website, made smart investments, married a true keeper. So I always assumed a baby would be a product of a decision I made or an action I took (and maybe a special soft-focus night involving some amaretto), not a grueling cycle of raised hopes, endless injections and crushed dreams. &amp;amp;#8220;Most things in life, if you put enough forward, you get a positive result,&amp;amp;#8221; says Cecily Kellogg, 38, of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, who&amp;amp;#8217;s tracked her battle with infertility in the blog &amp;amp;#8220;And I Wasted All That Birth Control.&amp;amp;#8221; But, she continues, &amp;amp;#8220;conception has absolutely no correlation to your efforts. It makes it doubly hard. It&amp;amp;#8217;s like, I&amp;amp;#8217;m going through all these treatments, I&amp;amp;#8217;m eating right, I&amp;amp;#8217;m doing yoga&amp;amp;#8212;what else can I possibly do?&amp;amp;#8221; An estimated six million American couples struggle with infertility; up to 20 percent have no specific medical explanation for their problems, which is the nondiagnosis my husband, David, and I got. Ovulation-triggering Ovidrel shots and egg-producing Clomid pills helped us conceive the baby we ultimately lost, but nothing relieved the nonstop anxiety along the way. I have felt, month after month, the heady high of knowing we timed things perfectly and, month after month, the much more hollow high of my official consolation prize: sushi and beer. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve re-Googled &amp;amp;#8220;early pregnancy symptoms&amp;amp;#8221; hundreds of times wondering if, say, being thirsty could indicate something&amp;amp;#8212;and then hated myself for building false hope. The Internet, in this context, is a bit like absinthe: It can take the edge off, and it can make you go insane. On my worst days, even the missing child photo on a milk carton has been a slap in the face. I remember thinking once, fleetingly but sincerely, that my friend&amp;amp;#8217;s dog had puppies just to spite me. &amp;amp;#8220;Here&amp;amp;#8217;s how far gone I was: I threw a fit over a For Better or For Worse comic strip when I saw that Michael and his new wife were expecting,&amp;amp;#8221; says Shana Aborn, of Ridgewood, New York, who got pregnant at 40 after a three-year ordeal. &amp;amp;#8220;I thought, how dare those SOBs pop out a kid without even thinking about it, when I was going to specialists and facing all these shots and procedures.&amp;amp;#8221; Like me, David is sad and frustrated. I know this not only because of the look on his face when we walk through our stroller-infested neighborhood but because of the things he&amp;amp;#8217;s said&amp;amp;#8212;how, for instance, he&amp;amp;#8217;s jealous of his happy daddy friends who can teach their daughters to throw a baseball. Yet he&amp;amp;#8217;s had surer footing than I throughout our ordeal, in part because men get to walk through life just outside the vortex of baby mania. Pregnant celebs are not even on his radar (there is no way, if I called him and asked him right now, that he&amp;amp;#8217;d know the name of Gwyneth Paltrow&amp;amp;#8217;s son). He is not besieged with baby shower invites. David cannot get how I feel viscerally, way down in my gut, mainly because his gut does not contain a uterus. Infertility is very, very lonely. Every woman in my close circle of friends has children, and none struggled to get pregnant. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve actually put myself into infertility quarantine, distancing myself from some friends&amp;amp;#8212;bless them for understanding&amp;amp;#8212;and asking a couple of them (nicely, I hope) to take me off their seemingly near-daily dispatches of baby photos. I have trained myself to look away from pregnant bellies and speed by the local smarty-pants kids&amp;amp;#8217; bookstore and hip-yet-crunchy children&amp;amp;#8217;s clothing shops in my neighborhood. And while I haven&amp;amp;#8217;t canceled my subscriptions to celeb magazines, I try to flip past the &amp;amp;#8220;pregnancy porn,&amp;amp;#8221; as Salon&amp;amp;#8217;s Rebecca Traister called it. Usually, though, I torture myself by peering through two fingers, unable to resist its lure. How did it get like this? The heartbreak that infertile women deal with is not a new phenomenon, I know. Surely my great-aunt Bessie felt, as I often do, that she&amp;amp;#8217;d failed as a woman or let her husband down as a wife (mine is quick to reassure me otherwise). But what&amp;amp;#8217;s new now is the strength, and number, of forces that can make the hurt worse. With many women delaying childbearing as they establish their careers and find a soulmate along the way (I met mine at 33), Junior&amp;amp;#8217;s arrival becomes one highly celebrated event. &amp;amp;#8220;When you finally have that sacred child,&amp;amp;#8221; says Rosanna Hertz, Ph.D., professor of sociology and women&amp;amp;#8217;s studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and author of Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice, &amp;amp;#8220;the baby isn&amp;amp;#8217;t just part of life, it&amp;amp;#8217;s likely the center of life.&amp;amp;#8221; (Waiting, though not always a choice, carries risks: Having a baby over 35, as 20 percent of women in the U.S. do, can increase the possibility of infertility.) Yet the infatuation with everything baby starts way before one&amp;amp;#8217;s due date&amp;amp;#8212;call it &amp;amp;#8220;bump watch&amp;amp;#8221; territory. Back in my mother&amp;amp;#8217;s day, pregnancy was TMI, unsettling evidence of lady-parts at work. Lucille Ball, though visibly bulging with &amp;amp;#8220;Little Ricky,&amp;amp;#8221; was not allowed to use the word pregnant on her show; she had to say &amp;amp;#8220;expecting.&amp;amp;#8221; Even in the freewheeling eighties, people&amp;amp;#8212;and not just the Queen&amp;amp;#8212;were appalled by paparazzi-snapped photos of a pregnant Princess Diana in a bikini. A decade later, Demi Moore posed naked and seven months pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. &amp;amp;#8220;It was the beginning of an era: The image of a pregnant woman became something of beauty,&amp;amp;#8221; says Scott Downie, president and founder of celebrity photo.com. Today, trendspotters consider pregnancy a &amp;amp;#8220;beauty status symbol.&amp;amp;#8221; There are &amp;amp;#8220;maternity photographers&amp;amp;#8221; who specialize in artistic nude shots of pregnant women looking to immortalize their pregnancies, and there&amp;amp;#8217;s chichi maternity wear designed to accent swelling stomachs. Meanwhile, the press&amp;amp;#8217;s hunger for celeb baby news has become insatiable. &amp;amp;#8220;After the Demi issue sold like hotcakes, magazine editors thought, we&amp;amp;#8217;ve got to get photos of pregnant celebrities. And it hasn&amp;amp;#8217;t stopped,&amp;amp;#8221; says Downie. The coverage of so-called pregnant celebs has gotten so extreme that last spring, one Internet satirist went so far as to mock up a cover of a magazine called Uterus Weekly; it featured such headlines as &amp;amp;#8220;Katie status: FULL!&amp;amp;#8221; and &amp;amp;#8220;Jennifer status: EMPTY!&amp;amp;#8221; For infertile women, the obsession with pregnant celebrities is excruciating on many levels. &amp;amp;#8220;I get frustrated and angry with all the stars who I feel are &amp;amp;#8216;unfit,&amp;amp;#8217; or at least questionable, parents,&amp;amp;#8221; admits Ashley White, 28, of Durham, New Hampshire, who has been diagnosed with diminished ovarian reserve (a decrease in number of eggs or egg quality). &amp;amp;#8220;Britney Spears driving around with a baby on her lap? Not fair! I would never endanger a baby like that! I&amp;amp;#8217;ve wanted this for as long as I can remember, I can&amp;amp;#8217;t get pregnant&amp;amp;#8212;and she gets two?!&amp;amp;#8221; Fueling the angst is the baby-gear boom. Infant products, from $158 silk Petunia Pickle Bottom diaper bags to Burberry baby eau de toilette, are an $8 billion market. And then there\u2019s the baby shower indus\u00ADtry, with books, websites and entire companies dedicated to the event. More than one company even sells kits for a bizarre group project: creating a plaster cast of the pregnant woman\u2019s belly. The instructions do not say to drop the finished cast from the roof of the building, but I\u2019m not saying I wouldn\u2019t go there. How baby mania hurts all women As painful as the fuss over babies and pregnancy may be for infertile women, some experts believe it&amp;amp;#8217;s not good for any woman, infertile or not. For one, breathless profiles of movie-star mothers and their new tots overshadow the fact that these women have other accomplishments&amp;amp;#8212;you know, like Oscars and $50 million opening weekends at the movies. The message: Having a successful career is nice and all, but don&amp;amp;#8217;t forget your true calling&amp;amp;#8230;Mom! Baby obsession isn&amp;amp;#8217;t healthy for mothers, either. &amp;amp;#8220;The ways we romanticize pregnancy only increase the postpartum hangover that is a normal but challenging part of motherhood,&amp;amp;#8221; says Amy Tiemann, Ph.D., a cultural critic and author of Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family. &amp;amp;#8220;Caught up in the frenzy, women can lose sight of the realities of what it&amp;amp;#8217;s like to have an infant. Reading about a Hollywood baby shower won&amp;amp;#8217;t prepare you for the sleepless nights and hard, physical work. The maternity marketing industry is a lot like the wedding industry, where people get so wrapped up in wedding plans that they neglect to prepare for the actual marriage.&amp;amp;#8221; Celebrity baby madness also breeds false hope. Says Domar, &amp;amp;#8220;I have patients who&amp;amp;#8217;ve said, &amp;amp;#8216;If Joan Lunden can do it at 54, I can do it at 45.&amp;amp;#8217;&amp;amp;#8221; While Lunden openly discussed using a surrogate, the press doesn&amp;amp;#8217;t always unearth just how older celebs have babies (often via egg donors or other medical interventions). As one reader wrote in an amazon.com review of What to Do When You Can&amp;amp;#8217;t Get Pregnant, &amp;amp;#8220;I had no idea that&amp;amp;#8230;my egg quality declines each year. I guess I thought that like Jane Seymour and Holly Hunter (both actresses older than me) I would have no problem conceiving well into my late thirties or even forties.&amp;amp;#8221; Baby craziness is troubling, too, in that it leaves out&amp;amp;#8212;even diminishes&amp;amp;#8212;women who don&amp;amp;#8217;t want children. &amp;amp;#8220;There are pros and cons of each,&amp;amp;#8221; says Tiemann, &amp;amp;#8220;but when motherhood is put on a pedestal, it is hard to keep the perspective that other life choices can be equally rewarding.&amp;amp;#8221; Me, I&amp;amp;#8217;m trying to have a baby again. Not long after my miscarriage, I went back on Clomid. We&amp;amp;#8217;re also saving up for IVF, just in case&amp;amp;#8212;and, yes, considering adoption. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve been trying to make friends with my body again, to relate to it as an ally, not an enemy. Staying active has made a difference. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve been on skates since I was three, and whenever I set out, on ice or in-line, I feel healthy, coordinated, in control&amp;amp;#8212;like my body, for once, is doing what I&amp;amp;#8217;m asking it to. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve also been seeing a social worker who specializes in infertility. In session after session, I&amp;amp;#8217;ve tried to separate who I am&amp;amp;#8212;a healthy, spirited, can-do woman&amp;amp;#8212;from my infertility: something that happened to me, something beyond my control. I&amp;amp;#8217;ll always remember the day when I dragged myself in after yet another negative test, beating myself up for having gotten my hopes up again. She said, &amp;amp;#8220;Hey, if you didn&amp;amp;#8217;t have hope, you&amp;amp;#8217;d have stopped trying.&amp;amp;#8221; That dose of perspective stays with me and buoys me when I have thoughts like, what if that baby we lost was the only one we could have? Yes, there is one huge, giant thing I want that I don&amp;amp;#8217;t have, and there is a huge, giant baby-mania monster out there that reminds me of it every day. But I also have a remarkable husband, father or not; I have work that I love; I am healthy, I am fine. I have loyal friends and a devoted family, who will love me no matter what&amp;amp;#8212;and who remind me that if I want to, it is within my power, somehow, to become a mother. And on good days, that helps. Contributing editor Lynn Harris, author of the forthcoming novel Death by Chick Lit, found out she was pregnant shortly after finishing this piece. She is due in November."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/2006/07/infertility/3>