Mother's Day is Devastating for Women Facing Infertility

Mother’s Day is painful for millions of women coping with infertility, which affects at least 6 million American women. “All of my clients dread Mother’s Day,” says Phyllis Martin, a fertility therapist. “Women who are distressed by Mother’s Day need to find a way to ‘take back the day,’” Ms. Martin added.

To help women who are facing infertility cope with Mother’s Day, fertility experts offer the following tips:

1. Share your feelings with your partner, family members and friends. Understanding how you feel will help them understand why you may choose to avoid certain events or places on Mother’s Day.

2. Don’t feel guilty or ashamed of your feelings about Mother’s Day. Give yourself permission to take care of yourself emotionally – even if it means changing traditional plans for the day.

3. Consider ways to protect yourself from emotionally charged situations. Instead of going to a restaurant with your mother on Sunday, for example, you might plan to spend Saturday with her instead or celebrate at home rather than eating out. (Many family groups with small children celebrate Mother’s Day in restaurants, and seeing those happy interactions can be painful for women who fear they will never celebrate with children of their own. It also can be difficult for would-be mothers when restaurant staff members ask female diners if they are mothers because they provide flowers or other gifts to moms on Mother’s Day. Saying that she is not a mother can be excruciating for a woman who is concerned about her fertility.)

4. Remember that some churches ask mothers to stand during services to be recognized on Mother’s Day. Ask your clergy to consider women who may be struggling with infertility when they plan services and to find a way to recognize women who are trying to become mothers, too.

5. Spend the day doing something you love – perhaps by enjoying a sport, hobby, movie or other activity that will engage you.

6. Honor your own efforts to become a mother or develop a strategy with your husband or partner to honor your efforts – perhaps by lighting a candle, planting a tree, wearing an angel pin or doing something else that is significant for you.

7. Avoid malls and other shopping centers right before Mother’s Day when store displays and counters are loaded with items promoted as Mother’s Day gifts.

8. Focus on the future and how you will achieve your goal of becoming a mother. Adoption is an option, but if properly treated, most women can become pregnant through advanced reproductive technologies, including in vitro fertilization (IVF) and in vitro fertilization using donor eggs.

Support groups can be extremely helpful for individuals grappling with the emotional effects of infertility. Ms. Martin facilitates a group for people interested in donor egg and a general infertility support group. Many clinics offer support groups- it is worthwhile to check with your local clinic to see what they have to offer.

Poll: Stress and Pursuing Treatment

The Hoopla About Folate- You May Not Like Spinach But Your Sperm Do

By David Karabinus, Ph.D., HCLD

“Eat your vegetables” is an exhortation often heard in childhood that is frequently followed by the statement “Because they are good for you”. And it is true: vegetables are an excellent source of vitamins and minerals that are essential micronutrients for normal growth and maintenance. Recently there has been considerable attention paid to dietary supplements that can have a positive effect on reproductive potential. One such supplement is folate.

Folate is a water-soluble B vitamin (Vitamin B9) that occurs naturally in foods such as cereal grains, green leafy vegetables such as spinach, broccoli, and lettuce, okra, fruits, legumes, yeast and numerous others. This vitamin is also available as a supplement in the form of folic acid. The nutritional importance of folate is illustrated by the publication of regulations by the FDA requiring the addition of folic acid to enriched breads, cereals, flours, corn meal and other grain products.

Folate plays an extremely important role in the production and maintenance of new cells, particularly during periods of rapid cell division and growth such as during pregnancy or infancy. It is crucial in organs characterized by rapid cell division because its role in DNA and RNA synthesis. The testis is an organ in which considerable cell division takes place since it produces millions of sperm every day. Because of this, one would expect folate intake to have an impact on reproductive function in general and testicular function in particular. Dietary folate deficiency results in reduced testicular and epididymal weight in lab animals; drugs that interfere with folate absorption or utilization can also adversely impact reproductive health. Chronic alcohol use has been shown to interfere with folate metabolism and result in reduced reproductive organ weights, reduced sperm production, and lowered reproductive hormone levels. Supplementation with folic acid has been shown to have mostly positive effects on human male reproductive parameters. Short term supplementation with 10 milligrams folic acid per day was shown to have no effect on sperm quality. Another study showed that men whose folate intake was low, moderate or high did not differ for seminal volume, sperm concentration, total sperm count, or sperm motility. However, several studies have shown that longer term supplementation with folic acid alone or in combination with zinc have had positive results on sperm output, sperm motility, and normally shaped sperm. Likewise, men who had a high level (~1000 micrograms/day) of folate intake exhibited a reduced level of sperm containing chromosomal abnormalities.

The results of studies show that folate can have a positive effect on male reproductive health. However, it must be recognized that reduced or impaired male fertility can be a result of many individual or interacting causes for which there is no single ‘silver bullet’ cure. Meanwhile, please pass me another helping of green, leafy vegetables.

Online Survey Finds Women Wait For Help

By Kathleen

An online survey conducted by Fertility Lifelines and Conceive Magazine was completed by 714 women. The survey found that the majority of women (64%) were waiting longer then recommended before seeking medical help about fertility issues. And even though 86% of women knew someone who experienced infertility most were surprised when they themselves had trouble getting pregnant. A significant number of women reported having emotional problems surrounding infertility including stress, depression, anger, and fear. The survey found women seek information from their medical provider, health magazines (50%), and the internet (78%). These issues along with tips for handling infertility are provided in a new free booklet entitled In The Know: What No One Tells You About Fertility. The booklet can be ordered at http://www.fertilitylifelines.com/ or by calling Fertility LifeLines(TM) at 1-866-LETS-TRY.

Hollywood Moms Highlight Infertility

It is refreshing when Hollywood is open and honest about infertility. The best known example of this is Brooke Shields who has become an advocate for women struggling with infertility. She went through numerous IVF cycles and a miscarriage and became increasingly frustrated. "Everyone around me was getting pregnant. I was starting to feel bitter," Shields said. "Maybe I really wasn't meant to have kids….I didn't want to be happy anymore for the many other people who were having kids. I knew that their blessing had nothing to do with me, but it felt like a slap in the face." She finally went on to conceive her daughter Rowan who was born in 2003. Shields was also very open about her struggle with post partum depression and wrote a well received book about her experience called Down Came the Rain.

Another well known actress, Courtney Cox, used IVF to conceive her daughter CoCo and suffered several miscarriages. Cox says that she will use IVF again in an attempt to conceive a sibling for her daughter. Cox is also considering adoption.

More recently, Desperate Housewives star Marcia Cross was so focused on starting a family that she apparently skipped honeymooning altogether to concentrate on fertility treatments. The 45-year-old actress had already been through infertility treatments and knew how difficult it would be to get pregnant at her age. After undergoing an IVF cycle, Marcia became pregnant with twins, Savanna and Eden, whom she gave birth to in February 2007. The star admits she regrets leaving it so late to become a mother. "It's costly and tough on your body and your relationship. I wish that I'd had my girls in my thirties. Then I could be around longer for them. But they're an incentive for me to stay healthy, take care of myself, and live as long as possible."

Infertility Calling: Do Cell Phones Affect Male Fertility?

By: David Karabinus, Ph.D., HCLD

Cell phones have become an inescapable part of our lives. An estimated 700 million are in use in the US and perhaps 2 billion in use worldwide. They are essentially small radio transmitters and receivers and, as such, expose users to radio frequency (RF) energy or electromagnetic frequency (EMF) radio waves. This is the same energy, at a much, much higher level, that cooks the food in a microwave oven. Every time a call comes in or goes out the cell phone either collects or emits the RF/EMF energy via its antenna.

Whether cell phones can affect male fertility has received much recent attention. Rats whose hind quarters were exposed for 30 minutes to RF energy for 30 minutes at about 25 times the level permitted for cell phones by the FCC exhibited an increase in the number of abnormally shaped sperm that were produced. Another study reported that rats exposed to cell phones for 6 hours daily for 18 weeks produced a higher proportion of dead sperm than unexposed rats. Although the sperm from the exposed rats were normally shaped, most of the sperm formed clumps. In another study, rats exposed to cell phones for one hour a day for 11 weeks exhibited no effects on their sperm. In humans, studies have shown decreased semen quality with increased cell phone use. Sperm exposed to a cell phone show reduced numbers of rapidly swimming sperm and increased numbers of non-swimming sperm. Men who had never used a cell phone produced more normally shaped sperm than those who had used cell phones more than 2 years. Another study showed men who used cell phones more than 4 hours per day produced lower amounts of live sperm, swimming (motile) sperm, and normally shaped sperm compared to those that did not use cell phones. This study also showed that the impact on these sperm traits increased as cell phone use increased from 0- to 2- to 4- to more than 4 hours per day.

The results of studies show that cell phone use can adversely affect the quality of sperm a man produces. The effects appear most pronounced with very high daily use. More study is needed to identify how these effects occur, or even if they are real and not a characteristic of men who spend much of their time on the cell phone. In the mean time, try to stay off the phone.

International Adoption: The Closing Window

After tripling over fifteen years, the number of adoptions by Americans of children from outside the United States has declined sharply. International adoption has never been easy. People who choose to build their families through international adoption have to go through an extensive process that often includes lengthy foreign travel, interactions with social workers and adoption agencies and complex government bureaucracies. The entire process can cost $30,000, or more. Language barriers, cultural differences and jurisdictional issues may compound the difficulties in the process. Waiting times to adopt may extend to years and countries sometimes choose to halt or delay adoptions even when they are in process. Newly tightened laws and regulations have now placed an estimated 5,000 international adoptions at risk of suspension in mid process.

The Hague Conference Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect to Intercountry Adoption is the primary cause of the new restrictions. This Convention, which was promulgated in the worthy effort to protect children and adoptive parents from possible abuses in the largely unregulated field of international adoptions, was signed by the United States in November 2007. The United States now has joined seventy other countries in an effort to regulate and standardize adoption practices across borders. Countries from which adoptions are originated must be part of the international regime. The formal effective date for US accession will be April 1, 2008.

The decline in visas for adoptions granted by the US government is evidence of the effect of the change. In response, China has established strict standards for adoptive parents which set an upward limit on age (50) and standards for education and parental body mass index, as well as eliminating adoptions by singles. Russia, which had suspended adoption agencies, has recently re-opened the field to agencies -- but long waiting lists now exist. Adoptions from Guatemala, which have surged in recent years, will be affected by the suspension of private adoption agencies and higher standards to control the fear of abuses resulting from the very low per capita income in that country.

Advocates for the convention believe that in the long run, these rules will benefit both children and prospective parents by ensuring higher standards for international adoption. In the meantime, those considering international adoption are faced with a more arduous and uncertain route and much to think about.