The Church and Infertility

[blessedwife318]

It is National Infertility Awareness Week, and I'm doing my part to bring awareness to this very taboo topic. I have not talked a lot about my infertility but I have not made it a secret on this board either. I want to encourage the people here at Baptist Board and especially the Pastors to be aware of this problem. Chance are you know a couple who is dealing with it as 1 in 8 couples do. I have found that there are very few good resources out there for the Christian family dealing with this issue. On Amazon when I looked up books on Infertility from a Christian perspective only 55 books came up and out of those only 11 were decent.

Also from experience this is not something that pastors seem to have put much thought into. When my husband and I went to our church to get some council on issues with infertility we were met with a deer in the headlights look, and no advice. We were really left to figure it out for ourselves which is not good. There are a lot of moral and ethical questions tied in with infertility and thankfully we had thought through some of the more obvious ones but even we reached a point where we didn't know what was the correct direction for us to go.

So Please educate yourself on this issue. It is a very common theme in the Bible and yet its not one that anyone really wants to talk about, which means people in the church feel alone with their struggle. If they come forward seeking help they deserve more than a deer in the headlights response.

Mods I was not sure where to put this topic so please feel free to move it if you think it belongs somewhere else.

 

[annsni]

Even though I have 4 children, I also dealt quite a bit with infertility. My first two pregnancies were achieved with the aid of Clomid, the third was with injectables, the fourth was Clomid and a new medicine for my polycystic ovarian syndrome and then the last 2 were just with this new medicine (which is not a fertility drug but a diabetic medication). I miscarried pregnancies 3 and 4 as well so not only did I deal with infertility, but I also dealt with the loss of two much wanted pregnancies. I agree that it is important for us to be educated on infertility and treatments and to be there to pray with and support a couple as well as to assist in any way we can for adoptions. Our guidelines for the treatments was that we wanted a child to be conceived through the normal methods (so no invitro treatments) and should we end up with multiples, we would continue with the pregnancy. A created child would continue as long as God would allow it.

 

[blessedwife318]

Even though I have 4 children, I also dealt quite a bit with infertility. My first two pregnancies were achieved with the aid of Clomid, the third was with injectables, the fourth was Clomid and a new medicine for my polycystic ovarian syndrome and then the last 2 were just with this new medicine (which is not a fertility drug but a diabetic medication). I miscarried pregnancies 3 and 4 as well so not only did I deal with infertility, but I also dealt with the loss of two much wanted pregnancies. I agree that it is important for us to be educated on infertility and treatments and to be there to pray with and support a couple as well as to assist in any way we can for adoptions. Our guidelines for the treatments was that we wanted a child to be conceived through the normal methods (so no invitro treatments) and should we end up with multiples, we would continue with the pregnancy. A created child would continue as long as God would allow it.

I knew that you had some personal experience with this as well. After 18 months of going to Dr. we were given the diagnosis of unexplained infertility. They could find no medical reason we couldn't get pregnant and at that point we decided to forgo any more treatments. For us it would have been one thing if there was a problem we were fixing, a blocked tube, or lack of ovulation for example, but to be in a situation where they would just start shooting darts to see what happened was not something we wanted to deal with. Especially since we had already made the decision that IVF was off the table.