The New York Times had an interesting article recently, called "Facing Life Without Children When It Isn't a Choice," featuring the personal stories and perspectives of six women.  

One of those women is Pamela Tsigdinos, who struggled with infertility and medical interventions for 10 years, before her and her husband finally decided that they needed to stop trying and accept the fact that they were going to be a family of two. (Adoption wasn't a calling for her and her husband from what I gather.) Here's a snippet from her blog, Coming2Terms, about dropping her dad off at church on Mother's Day:

An hour later I'm dressed and dropping him by the church at the end of our street. Despite his stroke he can, thankfully, still sing. He has a beautiful voice. The choir assembles early so my mother will join him later. We pull up to the curb. I get out of the car to say goodbye. I'm secretly grateful that I won't have to go inside with him.

In the last few minutes of our visit together, he grabs my hand and says haltingly, "You know this is the Mass where they have that awful display. When they ask all the mothers to stand. And all I can do is think of you and those like you and ... "

His eyes tear up. My eyes tear up. Neither of us know what to say next. And then I became a little girl again. I fall into his arms for a hug. He holds me tightly and whispers in my ear, "Goodbye, baby."

Beautiful.  And then there were the comments on this feature on infertility. Uh. Not so beautiful...

You won’t notice my absence, I haven’t been here long. I’ve so enjoyed coming to this site and feel that there is a wealth of support and information here at MTs.  I have come to greatly appreciate the forthrightness and insight into motherhood and the usually respectful tone used when expressing opposing opinions.

It has been a difficult road to arrive at a place in my life where I feel certain that I want to have children. I am stunned that this desire has taken such a strong hold on me in the last 2 years. Of course, desire for something does not necessarily translate into a dream realized.

I've never liked doing things the easy way. When my partner and I decided to have a child, we used my egg, fertilized with anonymous donor sperm, and carried in her uterus. (No, this isn't standard lesbian protocol, if there even is such a thing, but it's not unheard of. If you're interested, you can read the details over at Mombian.)

The procedure we used was a two-person variation of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Like all forms of IVF, multiple embryos were implanted in order to boost the odds that any one would make it. This meant there was a high risk of multiple births. Not that this would have been the end of the world; many parents have survived with twins or more (and a few might even relish getting the whole labor thing over with all at once), but it wasn't our preferred way to go. We spent a few anxious weeks hoping that we'd have only one, as indeed we did.

Our other anxiety was that we'd strike out after three IVF attempts, at which point our insurance wouldn't cover the procedure, at about $20,000 per try. (Sperm, for some reason, was never covered. At only $300 a shot, it seemed like a bargain. Yeah, yeah, I know, there are cheaper ways . . . didn't want to go there.) We got lucky, and did it in two cycles.

Now, scientists at the University of Adelaide say they have developed a new method of IVF that could double pregnancy rates and halve the incidence of  serious complications. It might also allow doctors to implant only a single embryo.

(I originally wrote this for Bay Windows (December 13, 2007), an LGBT newspaper, and focused on the commonalities between single straight moms and lesbian moms, coupled or not. Most mainstream coverage of the book, however (e.g., Newsweek), has focused on the issue of whether a woman can or should raise kids without a father if she doesn't have an appropriate man in her life. Take the discussion here any way you choose....)

Louise Sloan’s new book, Knock Yourself Up: No Man? No Problem: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom (Avery: 2007), is something of a novelty. It is perhaps the only parenting book by an out lesbian mom that is directed at a mixed audience, lesbian and not. While some books about single motherhood are inclusive of lesbian moms to varying degrees, and some books about lesbian parenting state they are also appropriate for single straight moms, Sloan goes beyond them and weaves the experiences of herself and other lesbians with those of straight women in an even-handed way that makes neither group feel like outsiders.

The book features her own perspective as a single mom by choice, as well as the voices of 43 other women whom she interviewed at length, representing a wide variety of backgrounds and choices on the path to parenthood. Sloan says she wanted her book to be "a lively support group in text form, offering a diversity of perspectives," and in this she succeeds. Chatty, informal and at times laugh-out-loud funny, there is nevertheless much practical information in the women’s stories and Sloan’s asides.

Some people, of course, feel single moms by choice are selfish and view men as unnecessary, the same argument many throw at lesbian moms. Sloan, however, argues "What the straight women in this book rejected was not men or marriage - it was the idea of getting into a bad marriage, or the wrong marriage, just to have kids. . . . In fact, many have made the decision to bear a child out of wedlock because they respect marriage too much to enter into it lightly for reasons of social and procreational expedience." For lesbians, the marriage situation is somewhat different, but the idea is the same: Don’t force yourself into the wrong relationship just to have a parenting partner. The de-linking of marriage and procreation, however, is one of the many reasons the book has already garnered a number of far-right detractors, who also seem to believe the lack of a dad means a troubled life for the child -- an assertion disproven by credible research. Straight single moms by choice and lesbians, coupled or not, may find common cause here, an alliance that in my opinion has yet to be fully explored.

The Contra Costa Times of California ran an article about women who choose or find themselves childless. The psychologists in the article say there is a period of sadness when a woman’s biological clock runs out and she does not grieve what could have been.

"Grief in its simplest form is unresolved emotion," says Bobby Rodriguez-Havens, executive director of the nonprofit Open Path, formerly Resolve. Open Path offers grief counseling to women who, as Rodriguez-Havens explains, lined their ducks up expecting a child to be automatic, and it didn't turn out that way.

"They question, 'Why haven't I met anyone? Should I have not gone for the MBA? Should I have married that guy in college?'" Rodriguez-Havens says. "When you don't deal with these emotions, you end up replaying the grief in your life in different ways."

What I liked about this story is the women mentioned in the article were strong, happy, and successful, not pathetic creatures waiting for Mr. Right and gorging on bonbons. They found an outlet for their nurturing instincts. One woman became a foster mother in her 40s and is about to adopt that child. Another woman chose to volunteer in a third grade classroom.

Lauren Edwards, of San Leandro, deals with her grief. A successful corporate writing coach, Edwards never wanted children, at least not in her 20s. So, at 22, she met and married a man who shared the sentiment. At 31, however, things began to change.

Edwards' biological clock went off, she says, and every lovely sunset made her yearn for the experience of sharing its beauty with a baby.

The phase ended, however. And six years ago, so did Edwards' marriage. Now, at 46, she says she has healed from the divorce, but the memories of pain and sadness are reminders of her decision.

"At the time of the divorce, I felt that choice had been robbed from me," she says. "Had I been married to someone else at 31, I'd probably have a child now. And I'd never guessed I'd feel so alone."

Edwards copes by volunteering at an elementary school in Oakland on Fridays. She works with third-graders who fill her up, she says. It's her favorite day of the week.

Fortunately, the stigma of having children later in life is gone. Also, there are more ways than ever to conceive: artificial insemination, IVF, surrogate motherhood and, of course, adoption. And one need not be a mother to care for so many people who need it in our society whether it be senior citizens or children with no or inadequate care. Good deal.

The New York Times interviews Dr. Sarah L. Berga this week.  Berga investigates the relationship between a woman's chronic stress level and difficulty getting pregnant. For example, Berga showed that some women with excessive levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, were able to restore ovulation after undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

I get Berga's concept, but there is something about this that just irks me.  A doctor assuming that a woman who is having difficulty getting pregnant might need talk therapy strikes me as the old "It's all in your head," school of medicine, which women have been victims of far too long.  

The author of the NY Times interview, Randi Hutter Epstein M.D. asks about this issue:

Q. (Epstein): In the 1940s, Freudian analysts told infertile women that lurking antimaternal thoughts made them sterile. Feminists later attacked this theory. Do you think of yourself as a continuum of this practice, or do you feel your ideas are completely different?

A. (Berga): Back then they did not know the mechanisms and they intuited relationships, but they were not all wrong. They were closer to the truth than we’d like to believe. The truth is that if you are not in harmony with yourself and your culture, you are stressed. That is not totally different from Freud.

What is the ideal age to have children? MSN.com actually asked people and put out this alarming article about women who wait -- sometimes into their forties -- to bear children.

Normally, I would roll my eyes at such an article since it tells women what to do. But I do think it is important to let young women know that, as this story pointed out, their fertility starts declining in their 20s and not their 40s as what has become conventional wisdom:

An international survey of 17,500 women released last year by the AFA found that most respondents mistakenly thought their fertility began to decline at age 40. The countries surveyed included the United States, England, Sweden, Uganda, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Argentina and Turkey.

While it's true that fertility takes a nosedive at 40, the decline actually begins in a woman's late 20s and accelerates throughout her 30s at a rate of 3 percent to 5 percent per year. By age 40, a woman has just a 5 percent chance of getting pregnant naturally in any given month.

Even women who should know better, sometimes don’t -- or maybe they're in denial, thinking they'll be the one to beat the odds. Dr. Richard Scott, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, says he recently saw a 45-year-old woman with a graduate degree in biology who said she wanted to get pregnant with her own eggs. But chances of that happening are slim.

Of course, living in this country where we have no safety net, it is difficult to reconcile the need for a career with the yearning for children. I still believe that women should wait until they are financially and emotionally ready for kids.

But I do think that if women know they will want children someday -- as I did -- they should keep the above statistics in mind. I am not sure what this means in practice though.

Women have long been wrestling with how to balance work and family planning, and delaying having babies to build their careers or even those of their husbands. Statistics show that as more women have entered the workforce since the mid-1970s, the percentage of first births to women ages 30 and up have increased fourfold, according to the American Fertility Association (AFA), a patient and advocacy group