Having Healthier Conversations about Fertility in the Church

If you're Mormon or Mormon adjacent, never underestimate how important it is to have healthy conversations about fertility with your kids.

I've known since I was a teenager that I would have fertility issues. My PCOS was still undiagnosed at that time, but the symptoms were already affecting my health. I suspected something might be up. Then it came up one day as I was studying my patriarchal blessing. As a result, I've known from the time I was 16 years old that I would have fertility issues.

I went through my Young Women lessons and my BYU dating experience already knowing this about myself. I dreaded the thought of getting married because I knew anyone who married me would probably miss out on parenthood. Thinking back over that point in my life, there was one person who had an open conversation with me about infertility that prepared me to be an infertile woman in the Church.

It wasn't a general authority, a bishop, a doctor, or a parent.

It was a girl from my freshman ward.

Her sister was already married and also in a student ward. She told me how her sister hadn't been able to get pregnant while she watched everyone else around her have babies. "She goes to church and listens to people go on and on in testimony meeting about how grateful they are that Heavenly Father trusts them with his children," she was explaining to me. "And she just sits there in silence thinking 'What's wrong with me? When is God going to trust me enough to parent?'"

Those words didn't fix my problem. But they prepared me to live in a community that has no healthy, compassionate discourse surrounding infertility and reproductive health. It prepared me to be bullied and misunderstood by the people in my own church.

Fast forward several years. I'm in my bishop's office. I asked him for a blessing because leaving my PCOS untreated for the sake of trying to conceive was unbearable. I'd spent my whole life being sick, and I wanted to know what it felt like to get better. To be normal. I wasn't willing to live on frustrated hopes anymore for something that wasn't going to happen. God was either going to cure my PCOS and allow me to conceive, or I was done giving any more of myself to the prospect of having kids.

Did I give God an ultimatum?

Yes, I did.

That blessing was the day I demanded a response from God because I needed one. And I got one. It was the same answer he'd been giving to me since I was 16 years old. Nothing had changed.

So, I let go of any hope or expectation that I would ever have kids. I stopped living my life in constant anguish over what I didn't and couldn't have. I started rebuilding and redefining happiness out of different materials than everyone else.

And you know what? There has never been a shortage of people in the Church who have found all kinds of reasons and occasions to tell me my life is wrong. That I'm doing happiness wrong. That my life should look more like theirs, that I should explain to them why it's different.

I tried so hard for so long to find happiness in the Church as a childless person. As a woman whose worth comes myself rather than external circumstances and conformity to everyone else's expectations. I tried until I had nothing left to give.

Being at Church felt like being held underwater. The environment wasn't made for me. To be in it, I had to hold my breath and find snatches of oxygen wherever I could. Take a gulp of air, serve in Primary. Take a gulp of air, sub in Nursery. Take a gulp of air, teach Young Women. A babysitter. That's what I felt like. A babysitter for other people's kids. Those were the jobs I was given to do because that's how the Church sees me as a women. Good to be a babysitter and not much else.

Part of why I served in the temple as an ordinance worker was because it was one of the few spaces in the Church where I wouldn't have to see any children. Even then, the workers and patrons were constantly asking me "Why are you a temple worker?" (i.e. Where are your kids?)

"How often could you have possibly been asked that question? Surely you're exaggerating."

My record was three times in one shift. I got good at pretending it didn't hurt, but that day I went home early and cried.

The idea of a compassionate, empathetic God is comforting. It does not, however, make it easier to live and worship among people who are, as a collective, very bad at this. You reach a point where you get tired of shedding tears because the people around you keep hurting you.

So, do we need Young Men and Young Women lessons on infertility and reproductive health? Yes. Because without them, they will grow into one of two kinds of adults:

• The adults who hurt people because they don't know any better.
• The adults who get kicked in the teeth when infertility happens to them.

If you never talk to your kids about the fact that infertility is normal and something that can happen to them, even when they "do everything right," you will send them into the experience thinking they did something wrong and it's their fault.
Infertility is not a personal failure. It's not a punishment. It's not a curse. It's not a reason for people to babysit your kids, or to have more responsibilities at church. It's not your narrative. You don't get to assign meaning and value to it.

For me in my life, I decided that infertility was a blessing. A gift. The road less traveled. The opportunity to lay aside everything old and ill-fitting from the way I saw God and the world around me. Infertility has given me freedom and independence from the constraints I would have as a parent. My time belongs to me, and I get the rare gift of deciding for myself how I want to spend it.

If someone, just one person, had been able to talk about infertility as an opportunity instead of a tragedy, the last ten years of my life could've been so different. 

Infertile people deserve that in all their interactions, but especially at church.