The danger of the dinner party

I have just had a conversation with a friend about the danger of the dinner party to the fertility fighter. She happily has a daughter as a result of a struggle with fertility and a successful round of IVF, but subsequent rounds, to produce a much hoped for sibling have left her without a second child and with a mountain of IVF debt. As she rightly says, it is rather like being a gambler, who is lured by a glimmer of hope,  and puts thousands on Hearts, knowing nonetheless, that the odds are stacked against them…

Here is something that she heard at a recent dinner party, full of floaty fertile types:

‘I think that having only one child is tantamount to child abuse’.

Mmmm. I think that I would have exploded. Here is something that I was subjected to:

‘They say that the gap between one and two, is less bad than the gap between none and one’.

And another, from an otherwise supposedly intelligent set of people….:

‘IVF babies look a bit wierd compared to other babies’

‘Yes, and they are more likely to be homosexual’

‘And of course, they can’t reproduce which is sad’

!!!

I honestly wouldn’t wish the sorts of struggles that I and my fellow fertility fighters have experienced, on anyone, and am glad that lots of people can drift through fertility as a granted, albeit some of them smoking, drinking, running marathons and the like…. But I do wish that those who can, could just think a little bit about those who can’t, before they open their mouths and put their great big insensitive and misdirected feet in it.