[Embedded "Our Little Rainbow, Singapore" logo image]
The Huffington Post is filled with articles on being single, or childless — such as, "The difference between being childless and child-free", the rather injurious "How does being childless feel as you age?" and generally, with the true and yet trite bottom line that "Being a woman is more than being a mother".
I know that this is a topic that splits society, it makes parents smarmy in their response to people even thinking about not having children, even though they will often sigh and say, yeah, I don't understand why anyone wants to have these liabilities. It makes infertile couples uncomfortable and often sad, when their situation is misunderstood as a choice. It makes old people dismissively say things like, you'll change your mind when you get older. It makes single people cringe at the perception of pity and being typecast as the person who lost out at human musical chairs.
This is especially so in Singapore, which is such a conservative society and where the government-sanctioned message is decidedly pro-family, although to be fair, I have to say it can be true in any setting which is fairly inward-looking and has a dominant social convention, like Brooklyn, or Minnesota or little towns in England or Africa.
Nobody really addresses what childlessness, particularly through infertility actually feels like.
Nobody told me that I would wake up on Saturday mornings, to an email about our 10th year university reunion and yet another baby announcement and realize I was the oldest and only married member in my dorm yet without children.
No one told me I would look back at the last few stationary years of my life, both personally and professionally and resent that I hadn't spent them on sabbatical, visiting wildlife reserves, moving around the world or travelling wildly. Or that while classmates who did those same things went on to joyfully introduce their young families at reunion, I would be checking out, or checking into yet another new fertility clinic down the same street.
No one tells you how impossible it can feel, or how desperate and tiring it can become.
I had the occasion to update the class list from my junior college (junior high, we were 17) class, who are all now 33 and fairly representative of a typical and average Singaporean group. In a small class of 17 people, 3 were male and 14 female. All of the men are married with children. Only 4 people (23%) are unmarried; they are all female and 3 out of the 4 have moved to the US for work or school. Only 3 women (17%) do not have children.
In Singapore, the proportion of ever-married women who do not have children when between the ages of 30-39 is 20%. The statistic for women unmarried at 40 is 14%. If you consider that the 20% that have not yet had children will decline as women progress through 30 to 39, if you are a married woman with no children, in Singapore, you are about as rare as the unmarried woman. In fact, you are actually more rare, as the proportion of ever-married women who have no children by age 40, falls to 6.9%.
Anyone who tells you that the experience of infertility is not isolating, or that you are sad or lonely only because of your "state of mind", is bull-shitting you big time. You are lonely because you are tangibly, the minority. It is not your 'perception' that is telling you that your WhatsApp rolodex looks like you are only friends with children, it is a statistical fact.
This process and struggle, over the last two to three years, has given me an unfortunate clarity, in fact you could say that it's cleaved my world into people who mean something to me, and moreover, which people I mean something to. I want to make it clear that there have been friends who have stepped up above and beyond the call of friendship, whose patience and presence have been an incredible support and source of gratitude to me.
But — your friends all do have children, probably young children, whom they have to go home to every day and who occupy their mind when they are not at home with them. Your 30-something year old friendships won't, often can't, be generous, equal or spontaneous, and you will be alone, because they will all be asleep by 10pm.
Imagine the difference in the robustness of female friendships and networking in, say, America, where 46% of women through age 44 don't have children.
I have been thinking about this for a long time and a recent blogger friend Jill put it into words very effectively. She said she wished for a society of women in her world that was robust enough to contain her infertility, one that was not a brittle let-down, one that would acknowledge her struggle on a private and sincere level. Who could teach women this?
[Embedded "Fertility Family Singapore" logo image]
To that end, I am happy to announce that I am co-founding Fertility Family, Singapore, an NGO dedicated to support, provide research and advocate for women who are experiencing difficulties or challenges with fertility or growing their family. This initiative was started by my friend and our founder, whose vision and optimism has been a personal blessing to me since our fortuitous meeting in a doctor's waiting room (where else?).
We believe that if you look at Singapore's statistics of later marriages and child-bearing — our mean marriage age is 30.1 years for men and 28 years for women and the mean age of mothers at first birth is 29.7, this is a necessary, important and growing need in Singapore.
Chances are, you know someone who is experiencing exactly what we are. There are no published rates for infertility in Singapore but the global incidence rate is 17% or 1 in every 8 couples. In developed countries, the infertility rate is closer to 25-30%. In Singapore, doctors estimate that 20% of all married couples will seek medical advice for infertility (medically defined as trying purposefully to conceive for more than a year, without success).
Many couples will overcome this easily by trying for longer, with simple medical intervention or have already decided not to have children. There are, however, many who will be in for a long and wearying fight that spans years of trying to conceive, recurrent miscarriage or IVF failure and deep-rooted communication, health risks and hard decisions, that can put a strain even on the best relationships.
The Singaporean female population between 15-44 years of age is 945,000. Taking into account the 44.1% marriage rate and a 20% infertility rate, there are at any point of time, 167,000 people who will be directly affected by infertility. 167,000 people who have at some point of time, felt confused, desperate, tired or frustrated, who have been unhappy with who and how they are, and who need to know they are not alone.
The most essential part of our work is creating a fertility family for women, by women. Within Fertility Family Singapore, the support arm Our Little Rainbow is a private support group and network, which currently has more than a hundred members.
The group is fully private or secret and provides both emotional counselling resources and health resources, although our main hope is that by giving women a forum to meet and connect with others who have had similar experiences and challenges, they can share information and resources and help with happiness and heartaches. We aim to be a friendly, patient, understanding and supportive environment and we absolutely do not discriminate based on religion, marital status or background.
Our website, www.fertilityfamily.sg, is in progress and beta testing for the next few months. It is aimed at being the voice for fertility patients, to break the silence on this issue, particularly the asymmetry of silence from women after they have been through these experiences, with success. I can't tell you how many people, whom I know have done ART or IVF or had recurrent miscarriages, who never speak of it, or worse, pretend like crazy that they haven't. And I get it, I do. No one likes to dwell in darkness or pain. I'm the same, too. Once you're past it, you would rather focus on only the normal, and the positive results, risks and consequences.
Those that are early in the process, probably feel as I did, that they don't want to jinx themselves, or that there is a cold, hard, mathematical probability to who will succeed and who not, within that unfortunate and thus somewhat aloof crowd. Many people feel this is a private issue and prerogative, and it is. You want to protect your heart from people who just want to know, but not help. Others perhaps feel like I used to think, that because infertility was a statistic and I was 'it', people I knew personally would be spared, as it wasn't possible for us all to be the same statistic — so why bother, panic and burden them?
Yet, all that is bullshit too, isn't it? If you don't ever speak up or share your experience, how will women who are struggling, know that they are not alone? How will medical practitioners, hospitals or the government improve their support and fine-tune their technique and protocols? Who will guide all these new women, who are living between lies to their families and for their absences at work, or who can't even bring themselves to say the word 'diarrhoea' out loud to male colleagues, in how it can be done and which aspects are truly important at the end of the day?
In the website, we want to create a one-stop portal for information, medical and psychological resources available in Singapore. Instead of running from clinic to doctor to TCM, we hope to provide a coherent and updated database of medical practitioners and protocols to help alleviate stress and logistics for families, for whom time is for the essence.
We believe that while only you can decide when and what help you wish to receive, you must be in control of your own fertility journey and you should make a coherent and timely plan for yourself. We want to enable women to better understand what to expect from the process of medical treatments, the types of diagnosis and how they can optimize their use of government assistance. We hope to also provide more open resources for other ways to grow your family, like donor egg/donor sperm, or adoption.
And of course, in each of these categories and topics, we want to provide real journeys and the voices of real women, talking about their own experiences — what worked and what did not.
In time, we would also like to advocate for more flexibility in government funding and provide better feedback to healthcare professionals, hospitals and pharmaceuticals surrounding the needs, care and service of fertility treatments and patients.
So, how can you help? First, educate yourself, read the pages about infertility etiquette for family and friends, or those on medical treatments and research. Keep checking the website www.fertilityfamily.sg as we continue to add content.
Second, if you are or know somebody who is currently experiencing, or has a history with primary or secondary infertility, point them toward the site and encourage them to send us an email at support@fertilityfamily.sg, to connect with or to join Our Little Rainbow. Hopefully, together, we'll get through a tough period in as positive a way as possible.
Third, we run a non-profit and as you can imagine, it takes a lot of time and manpower to keep the research up-to-date and to write articles, if you want to help with donating time or financial support, please email info@fertilityfamily.sg.
Thank you and have a great weekend!
