The Church and Infertility

It is National Infertility Awareness Week, and I'm doing my part to bring awareness to this very taboo topic. I have not talked a lot about my infertility but I have not made it a secret on this board either. I want to encourage the people here at Baptist Board and especially the Pastors to be aware of this problem. Chance are you know a couple who is dealing with it as 1 in 8 couples do. I have found that there are very few good resources out there for the Christian family dealing with this issue. On Amazon when I looked up books on Infertility from a Christian perspective only 55 books came up and out of those only 11 were decent.

Also from experience this is not something that pastors seem to have put much thought into. When my husband and I went to our church to get some council on issues with infertility we were met with a deer in the headlights look, and no advice. We were really left to figure it out for ourselves which is not good. There are a lot of moral and ethical questions tied in with infertility and thankfully we had thought through some of the more obvious ones but even we reached a point where we didn't know what was the correct direction for us to go.

So Please educate yourself on this issue. It is a very common theme in the Bible and yet its not one that anyone really wants to talk about, which means people in the church feel alone with their struggle. If they come forward seeking help they deserve more than a deer in the headlights response.

Mods I was not sure where to put this topic so please feel free to move it if you think it belongs somewhere else.

 

I knew that you had some personal experience with this as well. After 18 months of going to Dr. we were given the diagnosis of unexplained infertility. They could find no medical reason we couldn't get pregnant and at that point we decided to forgo any more treatments. For us it would have been one thing if there was a problem we were fixing, a blocked tube, or lack of ovulation for example, but to be in a situation where they would just start shooting darts to see what happened was not something we wanted to deal with. Especially since we had already made the decision that IVF was off the table.