Losing Your Fertility

When biology decides for you

Category: The Body

This booklet is for people who’ve discovered they can’t have children. Not easily. Not naturally. Maybe not at all. You found out through a diagnosis. Through failed attempts. Through time running out. Through your body saying no when you thought it would say yes.

How You Found Out

You were trying. Month after month. The trying became mechanical. Scheduled. Stressful. You were doing everything right. Tracking. Timing. Optimizing. It wasn’t working. Month after month. Negative test after negative test. You went to the doctor. Finally. You got the results. The diagnosis. The numbers. The prognosis. Your fertility is compromised. Limited. Declining. Gone.

What You’re Grieving

You’re grieving. Not just the potential children. The future you imagined. The identity you expected. The choice you thought you had. The control you thought you possessed. You’re grieving all of it. The grief is profound. Complicated. Disenfranchised. No one knows how to talk about it. Including you.

The Medical Reality

Maybe you have a diagnosis. PCOS. Endometriosis. Low ovarian reserve. Male factor infertility. Premature ovarian failure. Unexplained infertility. The words are clinical. Cold. They don’t capture what you’re losing. What you’ve lost. What you’re grieving.

The Loss of Choice

You thought you had a choice. About if. About when. About how many. You thought biology was on your side. Or at least neutral. You thought when you were ready, it would happen. You were wrong. Biology decided for you. Your body decided. Time decided. Something decided. And the decision wasn’t yours.

Good Company

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination — Elizabeth McCracken, 2008
McCracken was nine months pregnant when her son was stillborn. She wrote a memoir about the specific grief of losing a child who was real to you and invisible to everyone else. It’s short, precise, and refuses to perform hope or recovery. She understands something the booklet understands, that you can grieve a person the world never met and the grief is not abstract. It’s not theoretical. It’s the most concrete thing you’ve ever felt. The book for everyone who’s been told they can’t grieve something that never existed.
Pieces of a Woman — Kornél Mundruczó, 2020
Vanessa Kirby plays a woman navigating loss that no one around her knows how to hold. Her partner grieves differently. Her mother grieves loudly. Her body grieves on its own schedule. Mundruczó made a film about what happens when reproductive loss detonates a life and everyone expects you to reassemble on their timeline. It’s slow, physical, and it never looks away from the loneliness of mourning something that happened inside your body while the world carried on outside it.
Punisher — Phoebe Bridgers, 2020
Bridgers made an album that sounds like grief living inside a body that keeps going to the shops. It’s quiet, devastating, and full of the particular exhaustion of carrying something enormous through ordinary days. Nothing resolves. Nothing heals in time for the final track. She just keeps singing, about loss, about bodies, about the future being different than the one she planned. It’s the sound of someone learning to exist alongside a sadness that isn’t going anywhere. Not defeated. Not hopeful. Just honest.