Sunday 2 May 2010

The man's perspective

There was an article in the Times yesterday about infertility and IVF from a man's perspective. I found it interesting (though the comment at the end from the woman at Relate was a bit odd - 'self-service' is only banned for a couple of days leading up to egg collection, surely). I found the comments left by readers equally interesting - there was only one negative comment, and what I thought were some very good responses to it.

DH actually sounded very interested when I told him the article was there (in the print copy, in the Weekend section, this one was accompanied by three others, all talking about the man's perspective on IVF, but I can't see the other ones online). We had a busy day yesterday, but hopefully some time over the next few days he'll get a chance to read the whole feature.

I'll be interested to see what sort of reaction it sparks from him...

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this. The article itself made me cry (probably not a difficult achievment at this stage but anyway..) and it was so enlightenng to hear it from the mans perspective. I know my husband has some similar feelings to this author and I also had to agree with the author when he mentioned how his wife had changed from all the drugs. I felt like that after we had our 3 ivfs one after the other last year. I started to feel very disconnected from my husband and it's only the past few months when we've had a break from it all that we have grown closer and have a better understanding of each other. But I don't think it's infertility that causes the rift between couples, its just stress in general.

    The comments by the christopher forrester larakin made my blood boil (I'm sure it gave you flash backs of that womans post from months ago too) and I'm so angry that someone so stupid thought he was justified in commenting in such a way. Bah to him.
    x

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  2. That was a lovely article. Thank you for sharing it!

    Where we are right now, it's hard for me to see much of my husband in that article. I feel bad saying it, I just don't think he'll ever have the awakening the author did. That is not to say that he hasn't been hurt by it all, just that I don't think he'll ever admit it to himself much less anyone else. I'm not sure why it feels so important to me to know that he's suffering, too, but I do feel a bit cheated. Hopefully that feeling will go away as the pregnancy progresses.

    And I'm with egghunt on that bonehead's comments. What an ignorant fool. You know there is always a word ending in -ist to describe someone's prejudice (racist, sexist). What do you think it would be in his case? Fertilist? Infertilist?

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