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The dialogue around infertility is filled with assumptions related to privilege. Media depictions of difficulty getting or staying pregnant prioritize upper middle-class WASPy couples, or the actual one percent. Whether we’re following real-life stories of celebrities like Courteney Cox or Brooke Shields, or fictionalized ones, like Kate Pearson on This is Us, we see the same type of would-be mom: white, wealthy — this is what it looks like to struggle to conceive. Even a google image search for the word “infertility” brings up almost exclusively white women, or white hetero couples, making sad faces at staged doctors’ appointments.
There are few spaces for marginalized individuals to discuss their fertility experiences, and this could be impacting their success getting pregnant.
A recent study presented earlier this month at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Denver found that Black women have lower IVF success rates than white women — and researchers aren’t sure why.
