How Saying No To IVF Is Saying Yes To Fruitfulness |
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How Saying No To IVF Is Saying Yes To Fruitfulness
Leigh Snead’s recent book, ‘Infertile but Fruitful,’ provides a powerful Christian example for women struggling with infertility.
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People say that God laughs at our plans. If so, it is hard to hear, let alone join, this divine mirth while we weep over the wreckage of our hopes. Like generations of students reading Dante, we feel that any divine comedy has left us stuck in hell.
But as Leigh Snead’s beautiful recent book, Infertile but Fruitful: Finding Fulfillment When You Can’t Conceive shows, the story need not end there. Snead has written an account of a sorrow that no one wants, and that few want to discuss. As she put it, “I never asked to be known as the ‘infertility girl’ or the ‘adoption mom’ in my professional work. Perhaps a philosopher, a policy wonk, a photographer — or, when I was five, a zookeeper.” Nonetheless, she has written a book that will bless many, one that is, as she puts it, “the book I wish I’d had twenty years ago … a book for women who feel alone in their frustrated efforts to conceive a child.”
As this indicates, Snead wrote Infertile but Fruitful primarily for women, especially Catholic women like herself who are enduring infertility. Indeed, the germ of this book was a personal essay she wrote that went viral because it resonated with so many women. But this book is also an excellent resource for others — husbands, friends, pastors, counselors, and more — who seek to provide solace and advice. As Snead noted, “those of us suffering from infertility, are too often doing so in silence, isolation, and even shame.” This book will help rectify that. Snead shares her sorrows and consolations, as well as lessons she learned along the way — often the hard way.
Despite the suffering, she believes that hers is “a happy ending,” though it is not what she “would have written at twenty or thirty or maybe even forty years of age.” Nor, she acknowledges, is it what readers currently enduring infertility might regard as a happy ending for themselves. Nonetheless, she concludes that “for me at least, it’s a happy, even joyous ending.” It is not that all her sorrow and labor are over, but that she has found life and joy on the other side of the anguish of infertility.
And that joy is also present in her writing. Snead recounts her story in a warm and amusing style, beginning with the tale of a girl who went to college, met a boy, fell in love, got married, and settled down hoping to have babies. She shifts easily from cute stories about dating — she writes of their kinda-sorta first date at the Pitt-WVU game, “Carter flirtatiously asked me what I would give him in return for his fetching my drink. ‘If you bring me a diet Coke with ice,’ I said without thinking, ‘I will marry you’” — to reflections on religion, family, and marriage.
For a while, everything was great for Leigh and Carter. They........