Welcome to Science Babies

Hey, I’m Caitlin, and I am smack bang in the middle of receiving fertility treatments. For my husband and I this journey came as a complete shock, and was certainly not a part of our five year plan.

I should mention that we’ve previously conceived our now 2.5 year old daughter, Amelia, with absolutely zero troubles (I wasn’t even tracking my cycle). Before now I hadn’t ever heard of secondary infertility, I didn’t realise it could be a ‘thing’. Yet here we are, 18 months into trying to conceive baby #2 and still, no baby.

Once I realised I had secondary infertility I became more curious and did a bunch of research. I was shocked to find how common it is, while it’s seemingly unheard of. I was pretty upset by it, really. I mean, I hate being caught off guard — why aren’t we spreading the word more?

During my journey with trying to conceive and now apparent fertility issues thus far I’ve felt all spectrums of emotion. Despair, loneliness, hopelessness, frustration… through to anticipation and excitement and tireless hope. But also, a huge amount of shock and confusion.

No one prepares you for this to be a potential ‘stage’ of your life. During sex ed in high school you learn about contraception and how unprotected sex can lead to unplanned pregnancy, if anything you’re made to feel as though you’ve got a 99.9% chance of falling pregnant each time you have sex. There’s never any talk about fertility and what happens when you actually want to plan a family. It’s not fair to anyone with hopes and dreams of building a family be unaware of an integral piece of the puzzle.

Even more, those who do experience fertility troubles and require assistive reproductive technologies (ART) often feel nervous to share their situation with others. Somehow there’s a sense of blame and shame involved, like infertility is your fault and it’s somehow something dirty and not to be spoken about.

No one talks about it, so no one knows HOW to talk about it, so we all just ignore it.

So, with all that time I have on my hands in between mostly solo parenting, working part time, attending fertility appointments, researching my treatments, taking my medications and supplements… I decided to start a god damn blog to get the word out.

My hope is to normalise all paths to parenting, so that those going through it feel less isolated, and those supporting them feel better equipped to do so.