Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (91 page)

Effectiveness statistics from Planned Parenthood (see
www.plannedparenthood.org
).

TRANSFORMING INFERTILITY

The ability to conceive and bear children can profoundly affect the way a woman feels about herself on a very deep level. So when a woman finds that she is unable to have a child, she’s often thrown into great despair and feels a sense of injustice: “Why me?” Seeing teenage mothers having no problems getting pregnant becomes almost impos sible to bear, unless the woman can find some meaning in the experience and come to terms with it. The pioneering work of Alice Domar, Ph.D., founder and executive director of the Domar Center for Complementary Healthcare in Waltham, Massachusetts, has clearly documented that women who’ve been diagnosed as infertile are twice as likely to be depressed as a control group, and that this depression peaks about two years after they start trying to get pregnant. And even though infertility is not life-threatening, infertile women have depression scores that are indistinguishable from those of women with cancer, heart disease, or HIV.
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Approximately one in every six to ten couples has a problem with infertility. About 40 percent of the problems are related to a male factor and 60 percent to a female factor. Statistics show that sperm counts have been gradually falling over the past century. Decreased sperm counts are associated with cigarette, marijuana, and alcohol use as well as with environmental factors. Humans cannot pollute this planet and their own bodies without consequences, and infertility is one of them. Conditions on the earth may not fa vor fertility the way they used to. It’s as though the collective species brain were generating a great deal of energy toward making many women and men less fertile, due to the stresses of today’s families, social environments, and personal addictions, and to stress on the planet itself. Too many stressful childhoods remain unhealed; too many children grow up too fast. We’re not allowing nature’s rhythms to click into gear naturally. Repro ductive problems associated with toxic chemicals and with electromagnetic field disturbances may be part of the reason why fertility rates have been decreasing in industrialized nations for decades.
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But that doesn’t mean that an individual woman’s fertility will necessarily be adversely affected.

Fertility is affected by many different factors, such as diet and environment, but in about 20 percent of the cases, the causes are unknown— meaning that medical testing cannot explain the problem. In my experience those couples who are most willing to look at and work with the mind-body connection in addition to the other aspects of fertility are the ones who are most successful either con ceiving or healing their relationship with fertility.

The most common (and often interrelated) factors affecting female infertility are the following:

Smoking

Following a high-glycemic-index diet with inadequate micronutrients

Irregular ovulation

FIGURE 16: THE CAUSES OF FEMALE INFERTILITY

Endometriosis

A history of pelvic infection from an IUD or other source, causing scarring of the fallopian tubes

Unresolved emotional stress that results in subtle hormonal imbalances
Immune system problems—some women make antibodies against the sperm of some men and not others, or against the fertilized egg that is created with some partners but not with others
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Age