Opinion

January 14, 2013 (LiveActionNews.org) – Hi, my name is Kristen, and I’m infertile.

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I debated long and hard whether I should share these personal revelations with the world. But I decided to go ahead and tell all – again – because it needs to be said, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me.

Every day, around the world, about 125,000 babies are aborted. Since the beginning of 2013, as I write this, 544,306 babies have been aborted. Another one just now. And just now. More than one per second. Now it’s 544,355. Over half a million lives in less than a week.

Meanwhile, back at the Batcave, my husband and I are trying to conceive.

I figured that when I was (finally) settled down and hitched up and ready to have a baby, it would just sort of happen, like magic. That’s what happened to my mom. She got pregnant without even trying. In fact, about 125,000 women a day get pregnant despite not even wanting a baby. They don’t want their babies so hard they have them killed before they can be born.

Meanwhile, something like 10% of women struggle to conceive. There’s been a lot of talk about the 1% and the 99% percent in the past year or so. Well, I am the 10%.

Meanwhile: 544,612.

I have a disorder called PCOS, or Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. I’ll spare you the juicy details, but it basically means I don’t ovulate, and if you don’t ovulate, if there is no egg to fertilize that will become a zygote-embryo-fetus, you obviously can’t get pregnant.

We haven’t been trying for very long, but two days ago my doctor gave me the low-down: there’s no point “giving it some time,” because unless there is medical intervention to make me ovulate, I won’t. So I face the delightful prospect of having holes burned into my ovaries (laparascopic ovarian drilling) and then taking pills and possibly injections. These measures, if they work (there’s an 80% chance they will), will raise my chances of conceiving from exactly 0% to roughly 50%…for about six months, at which point the effects wear off and we have to try something else.

There’s also the possibility – which I try not to contemplate – that nothing will work. And then we face the even more daunting prospect of trying to scrape up the money to adopt, something we will be able to afford to do only once, if at all.

By the way: 545,106.

We won’t go to Brave New World lengths to conceive – no IVF for us, thanks. But we are trying fertility treatment before adoption because (a) with health insurance coverage, it is infinitely cheaper, and (b) we have the totally normal biological urge to have our own baby. I think adoption is beautiful, but I am human, and I have the innate God-given desire to reproduce that roughly 99% of humans have.

Until very recently, I never noticed all the pregnant people constantly surrounding me. I noticed baby clothes, because they were cute, but not in the heart-wrenching, horrible way I notice them now. Everyone is pregnant, and there are babies everywhere, or so it seems to me.

I also think about abortion differently. I’ve seen it as the world’s most terrible tragedy for about six years now, but never before has it packed the personal punch it does now. In the United States alone, there are millions of women like me, spending at least some of their waking life in an agony of anxiety and longing and hope and prayer and grief, trying everything from herbal supplements to special lubricants to expensive pills to having holes drilled in their ovaries to get pregnant. They obsessively pee on sticks to the point that it becomes a literal addiction, and many of them suffer repeated, heart-wrenching miscarriages.

Meanwhile, every day, 125,000 women a day pay a doctor to murder the miracle we would literally give our right arms for.

545,801.

What makes it even more horrible is that most of us, though we really want to have our own babies, would be more than satisfied with motherhood, period. Unfortunately, while having high standards for adopting couples is understandable – you don’t want to give a baby to just anybody – it seems that often the standards (and fees) are so high as to be unattainable by people who might make great parents.

The other day, at Half Price Books, the back cover of a book about adoption gleefully informed me that adopting a baby only costs about as much as a new mid-size sedan. Well, my husband’s truck is a 2001 and mine is a 2005. What does that tell you about our ability to afford a new mid-size sedan?

Meanwhile: 546,213.

We have all these couples trying to have babies, and all these women having theirs killed. We have all these couples who would adopt if they could, and all these barriers in their way.

I used to drive past abortion clinics and feel, yes, the sadness, the horror, the indescribable demonic evil of it. Today, I drive past and feel the same, but more. Deeper. Different. I feel like a man lost at sea must feel, dying of thirst, staring at an ocean of water he can’t drink.

I wish I could bring this all to a nice, neat point. Maybe I don’t have one. Maybe it’s enough that I share with you my personal trials and travails to show you a new way in which abortion is misery and cruelty made manifest.

547,328.