Written by Leigh Kolb for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.
The students in my African American Literature class read Audre Lorde’s “Now That I Am Forever With Child” this week. I pointed out that although none of us had given birth, we could feel and understand the poem, and as a result even understand the experience on a deeper level.
I asked the one young man in the class his reaction to reading a poem about pregnancy and childbirth. He said that when he first read it, it seemed like something very foreign that he couldn’t imagine, but after reading it again and discussing it, “it felt familiar.” Familiar.
I write and talk often about how women’s stories are marginalized if they’re even told at all, and how that continuously degrades our experiences. I kept thinking about the word familiar, and how powerful it is when others’ lives and experiences are familiar to us. The role of media, in large part, is to familiarize us with life. Feature films and television series serve to entertain, but they play a larger role in normalizing and informing audiences of life–confirming our own lives and introducing us to the lives of others, even if those lives are fictional.
Representations of infertility and pregnancy loss in film and on television are greatly lacking. Neither of these life experiences is familiar to us, unless we go through it ourselves.
I try to rationalize why portrayals of infertility and pregnancy loss are so rare. Where is the action, a scriptwriting professor scribbled in my margins when I had too much internal dialogue or a conversation between female friends. There’s not much action in infertility. The struggle is literally and figuratively inside.
But then I realize I’m just making excuses for Hollywood. Infertility and pregnancy loss are rich with story-line possibilities. The very nature of these tragedies is in lock-step with literary conflicts and archetypes. (Wo)man vs. self? Check. (Wo)man vs. nature? Check. Journey/quest? Check. Unhealable wound? Check.
Hollywood has had some success recently with clips portraying the pain of infertility and pregnancy loss (Up and Julie and Julia, most notably). Why can’t an entire film take up the subject? (And by that I mean a film that doesn’t “solve” infertility through highly problematic magic.)
As a feminist, I’m glad that there isn’t an influx of films that focus solely on a woman’s desire to have a baby, reducing her role in life to just centered on motherhood. But as a feminist struggling with infertility and pregnancy loss, I desperately want to see this struggle faithfully mirrored back to me, both for myself and for everyone, so it becomes familiar.
According to the CDC, almost 11 percent of women have impaired fertility, and 6 percent are infertile. RESOLVE reports that 1 in 8 couples struggles with infertility. The miscarriage rate of known pregnancies is between 15 and 20 percent.
These experiences aren’t rare. So we shouldn’t be made to feel like they are and that we are so alone.
Journalist Mona Eltahawy wrote,
“Women’s stories are too often dismissed. A male editor I once worked with tried to dissuade me from the personal: ‘Who cares about what happened to you?’ The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really mattered.
It does.”
Our lives do matter. Seeing women’s stories reflected faithfully on-screen cannot only serve us emotionally, but it can practically affect men’s and women’s lives by making the lives of over half of our population familiar. The galvanizing effect of this familiarity is more conversation. For infertility and pregnancy loss, the conversation could lead to more medical studies, legislation regarding insurance coverage and defeating so-called “personhood” measures.
Infertility and pregnancy loss are still far too taboo in our culture, and that has very real consequences. Couples are faced with mental health challenges (certainly feeling as if one’s problems aren’t even on the radar of “real” problems due to lack of representation, and conversation affects people emotionally and mentally), and the majority of states’ insurance plans offer no coverage for anything to do with fertility.
It is human nature to look for ourselves and our own stories reflected back to us in media and in others’ stories. In the case of infertility and pregnancy loss, those representations are almost nonexistent. An already lonely struggle is made to feel even more so without those representations.
Women’s lives have drama. They have journeys and conflicts and tragic struggles. Hollywood should take note.
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| A moving still from Up. |
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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. She wrote “How Not to Be a Dick to Your Infertile Friend” and “It Happened to Me: I Had an Ectopic Pregnancy” at xoJane.
You totally hit the nail on the head when it comes to the utter lack of conversation concerning pregnancy loss and infertility. The idea you shared about “familiarity” is fascinating. Once the paradigm shift really happens, it will make these traumatic events easier to cope with.
When I went through my own experience with pregnancy loss, I felt so alone. I was physically alone because my husband was deployed in Afghanistan. Emotionally, I felt alone because our collective conversation (here in the USA) about miscarrying and infertility is so quietly voiced it’s a whisper.
Thinking you’re the only one going through something like a miscarriage is tough. Before my pregnancy / miscarriage I didn’t know more than a few women who’d been there / done that. But once I posted publicly about what was going on, more women began to pipe up. So many women came out of the woodworks to share their stories.
The more I heard from others, the less alone I felt. Stories of women going on to have healthy pregnancies gave me hope. By sharing our feelings and bringing the dialogue front and center, we can all work together to reduce the stigma and treat impediments that we have today.
And I think we should also be cognizant in how we communicate. While some support is better than none, the normative hush-hush nature of how we communicate about these issues has to evolve as well. We can’t keep reinforcing the notion that a miscarrying is taboo and shameful.
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Anyways, great post. I really liked it, and as you can see by the novella I’ve typed out – my passion runs deep for the cause. You’re given me a lot to think about.
Beautifully written. A lot of good points about Infertility and Miscarriages and why it should be more present in media. What you said about familiarity is really interesting, it really makes me wish there were more stories that explored these subjects.
Have you seen The Other Woman? It stars Natalie Portman, and came out around 2009 but I don’t remember a lot of promotion for it at the time. It’s about a woman who is dealing with her grief from her newborn infant’s death from SIDS and trying to have a healthy relationship to her stepson. I mean, I have a heart of stone and it just wrecked me. I would be very interested to read a review from a feminist perspective, particularly thinking about how few representations of infertility and pregnancy or infant loss there are in Hollywood.
I think that part of the problem here is that this is seen as a “woman’s issue,” and although so-called chick flicks obviously do just fine at the box office, they sell fantasies, not harsh truths. So I suspect films that tackle this subject have their own weightiness as a Serious Film undercut by the perception that they’re lady-films.
I haven’t seen that film, but it’s on my list now! I think you are spot on about the reluctance to deal with the “harsh truths” of women’s issues. At the same time, we get harsh truths about men’s lives constantly. Excellent point.
Thank you! Yes, when I spoke publicly about my losses or infertility, many women came forward (oftentimes in that “whisper” you talked about). Wy aren’t we talking about these things? We need to! I mean, we’ve obviously just been exploring the “why,” but I’m still going to whine about it.
It fascinates me how much we read about/see literature and film about war and stereotypical men’s battles (literal and figurative), but we are never exposed to the feminine battles of infertility and pregnancy loss (or any other harsh truths like Madame X says).
I’m so sorry for your loss, and I hope for very good things for you in the future.
I’ve used that excuse, too, that an infertility story line is too “boring,” to difficult to portray. Certainly, a 2 hour film could not encompass a journey that often takes years to resolve, if at all. And, the temptation to solve it with a wish (like Timothy Green – barf) or a surprise “miracle” pregnancy is too great, and too harmful to people who suffer with IF.