-By Julia Indichova
Infertility specialists of all persuasions - be they reproductive endocrinologists or practitioners of natural fertility treatments – agree that sexual arousal will improve the quality of cervical fluid, energize hormone function, support estrogen production and a strong ovulation, and generally increase your chances of getting pregnant. Yet the experts also agree that the stress of infertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization, and monthly disappointments can easily break up a marriage.
Maybe so. As I see it, in vitro fertilization can help you find out who your partner really is, and better understand the strength of your marriage.
Several years ago, tucked away in the bottom corner of theNew York Timeswas a tiny article about a sixty-two- year-old woman who conceived and gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Amazingly, this pregnancy was not a result of a donor in vitro fertilization treatment.A tabloid ran a photograph of the woman bathing the baby, with her grandchild looking on. It turned out she had a rather natural fertility enhancing experience: A whirlwind affair with her next-door neighbor. A passionate affair that reminded her body something it had known how to do many years earlier.
I'm not suggesting that you wait till you're sixty, but could anyone argue with the fact that baby-making was intended to be a supremely pleasurable experience? Doesn't it make sense that the most ideal environment for conception is not an examining room of an in vitro fertilization clinic, but a bedroom with plenty of room for intimacy and pleasure?
When baby making turns into a tedious set of acrobatics, timing and fumbling around with ovulation kits, passion becomes a thing of the past. In such an environment it's not surprising for sperm to get lazy and for ovaries to grow sluggish.
One of the homework assignments I give in my Fertile Heart™ workshops is meant to stimulate the release of sense memories locked in the tissues. I ask clients to recall an activity they used to love to do in their teens, and to wear colors they liked then, in order to bring back the kinesthetic experience of being eighteen.
Cory, an actress in her early forties, who after a failed in vitro fertilization treatment and several miscarriages had almost given up hope of a healthy pregnancy, took this assignment one step further. "I started wearing my sorority sweatshirt, and all this old stuff about college started coming back. So on a whim, Steve and I decided to drive out to New Hampshire and visit my alma mater. We walked around campus all afternoon, and you could just smell all those hormones in the air. We stayed in a great bed-and- breakfast, went out to eat, danced, and made love like mad."
And it worked! When Cory's fertility specialist first saw the baby's heartbeat and looked at Cory's promising hormone levels, he told her it was the first time in his twenty-year fertility practice that he had seen anyone with her medical history beat the odds.
Although in common usage the word erotic is linked to sexuality, an erotic experience is one in which we are fully present to feelings and sensations rising up in us. It's about living everything. Pleasure and pain. Joy and grief. In other words, fertility in the deepest sense of the word.
Andrea, another client whose marriage was rocked by the storms of invasive in vitro fertilization treatments writes: "After the workshop we sat down and talked till dawn. Do you believe that this was the first time in the eleven years of our marriage that I saw my husband cry?
Let me tell you there is nothing sexier than a weeping man. We're taking a break from it all. No more talk of in vitro fertilization, intrauterine insemination or any other proding and poking procedures. I told George we had to give up the chase because it's chasing all the fun out of everything we do. Things are better than ever. We're not pregnant yet, but we're having a hell of a good time trying."
That, to me, is a fine way to hit the baby-making trail.
