How my body failed me
My (in)fertility journey
The struggle against medical racism takes different forms in different places, but if we want honest, concrete, and above all effective ways of addressing the violent histories that we have inherited, then we might want to be able to get to the root of the problem, even if the topic is as simple as whether or not we can reproduce. Writing for The Nation Magazine in October 2020, where I describe how Covid worsened Maternal and Reproductive Care, I tried to find how these issues impacted Black women. In another essay for Aljazeera, I wrote about how the myth of Black hyper-fertility harms Black birthers and discussed the historical genealogy and present manifestations of the long-standing inequalities in reproductive health. Not only has this myth fed inaccurate diagnoses and missed opportunities for reproductive autonomy, it also leads to additional emotional distress for Black people who suffer from infertility, in some cases exacerbated by stigma and poor access to assisted reproductive technologies—something that I am intimately familiar with.
Less than two weeks ago, I published “Infertility Stung Me,” an article for The Guardian Long Read— while layered and complex—documented my (in)fertility journey. In the text, I am not only reflexive about the embodied experience of reproductive assisted technology, most notably IVF, but I provide the cut-and-dried and weighty issues that come with not being able to conceive.
In the text, I discuss my relationship with my partner, my coming-of-age, and the tension between my feminism and Kinderwunsch. For people who struggle with infertility, the text might be illuminating but is more expansive than a surface-level struggle with reproduction. I waddle through my biography and try to find a way to redefine family when I live thousands of kilometers from any biological kin. As I write in the text:
There are people who have had families that give them support and comfort and a model for what love might be. At present, that is not my reality. We are often told that, in order to get a sense of ourselves, our humanity and our worth, we must become parents. And for those of us carrying intergenerational trauma – enslavement, genocide, forced migration – the pressure to “carry on the family line” complicates what family obligation means. For women from Black, working-class families like mine, to have children – countering the forces that tried to destroy us – can be a powerful political act.
I say all this not to be fatalistic, or even to reduce the cherished and beautiful moments of Black kinship, but to highlight that the historical discrimination against Black women has combined with these discriminatory narratives about them to strip away our humanity. My aunts speak about parenting in vague terms, about how they value it, not for some intrinsic reason, but as something that their parents and grandparents did. Never do they say what I think about motherhood: they do not speak about the material difficulties and psychological struggles. Instead, their dreams are deferred to my generation, who they hope might avoid the hardships they endured. Being a parent is one of the most underappreciated jobs in our society. Of course, we should demand wages for housework and provide more space and support for people who do this. As I struggled to get pregnant, I was aware that so many of my life circumstances have been shaped by who deems me worthy of care.
You can read the text directly from The Guardian Long Read. Please feel free to pass this on to your friends, colleagues, or anyone you think might benefit from reflecting on what it means to reckon with new definitions with family.