- Share This Post
- submit
- 29
-
Sparkle (0)
There I was, my back to the front door, Twittering about the Wonder Pets (what do you guys think about the Ollie character who pops up in the "Saves the Skunk" episode? A little grating...right?) when my husband burst through the door, flinging the grocery bags brimming with half-and-half and veggie chicken nuggets to the ground to brandish the shocking evidence.
"It was in vitro!" he roared, shaking the cover of Us magazine in my face.
And the world stopped.
And that was the moment that everything changed.
Just kidding. I went back to Twittering about Wonder Pets.
But you truly do need to pause and discuss a magazine cover that uses an exclamation point to share the news. We use an exclamation point in my house to discuss gruesome murders and shocking love triangles and the D.C. lawmaker-scandal du jour. But if you examine the cover, the stories that get the exclamation point are Jennifer Garner's pregnancy (Jen Garner Pregnant!) and Salma Hyack's split (Salma and Fiance Split!) and, of course, IT WAS IN VITRO!
The stories that didn't warrant an exclamation point are a mother giving up custody of her children (which is, in my opinion, a little more remarkable than a break-up) and a woman having a very public affair with a married father of four that was caught on film.
My husband sourly explained the need for the exclamation point that evening at dinner. "What are movie stars but the 21st century replacement for a fertility goddess. If our fertility goddesses are using in vitro, where can we place our conception daydreams?"
"Do boys fantasize about getting girls pregnant?" I asked.
"No," my husband admitted. "I mean, not unless they've been doing fertility treatments for several months and their wife is hopped up on hormones and she is saying terrible things to him whenever she comes down from progesterone and they're revolving their lives around the 10 p.m. trigger shot."
But it was in vitro! We can't stopped screaming that at each other when we pass in the kitchen. We like to shout it before bed, making sure we get that perfect combination of astonishment and disdain in our voices as we gasp it out. In vitro!
I obviously have a skewed view of treatments since I need them myself in order to build my family--I didn't think that medical procedures were particularly gasp-worthy prior to being diagnosed as infertile (it was Lasik!) nor do I think the media does the infertility community any favours when it creates magazine articles sensationalizing and marginalizing necessary procedures. No wonder we end up with 380+ idiotic comments about infertility when actual news sources such as the New York Times tries to shed light on the reality of the condition.
What I'm not here to debate is whether the story has any basis--of course it probably doesn't. If you get your news from Us magazine, there is a deep, deep problem with your world. If you want serious news, you need to turn to a serious news source such as People magazine. And People hasn't covered this yet. At the end of the day, I don't care whether or not Jolie is a stirrup queen or is planning on having ten more babies or whether she is really an alien planning on overthrowing our government (wait...scratch that...I actually would care about the last thing). What I care about is that once again, a medical procedure that has brought so much peace of heart to infertile men and women is being held up for ridicule and shock like a Barnum side show. Or, as if they've caught her...GASP...cheating. With in vitro!
Mustard Seed Baby mused about the impact the article would have on the infertile community: "Will it be chalked up to celebrity baby-timing (the article alleges that she wanted to 'knock it out' and not deal with the 'stress of trying to get pregnant'), or could it bring the attention to IVF and those going through it that these folks have brought to international adoption?"
But it's sort of a moot point because even if it brings attention to IVF, it isn't the good kind of attention (and was the attention they brought to international adoption truly an enlightening moment for the community, educating and informing? Or did they simply reinforce misinformation by never showing
