The BABY BUSINE$$
Jessica* had undergone two bruising rounds of IVF when she decided to switch doctors. With her first failed attempt being followed by a traumatic miscarriage, her treatment was proving to be tougher than she’d expected. Her body was bloated and sore from the hormone injections, but she had pulled herself together and focused on the baby she longed for. She was at an early scan with her husband, feeling good about her decision to change clinicians, when her new doctor made an alarming comment.
“She was looking at my follicles and saying, ‘That’s okay. Have sex tonight, and then have sex tomorrow,’ and we were sitting there confused,” Jessica, 37, recalls. “She said, ‘Sorry, is that confusing? You need to have sex.”
Jessica had to remind her doctor that her fallopian tubes had been removed, which is why she needed IVF in the first place.
“It is stuff like that that’s really quite damaging,” she says in a tearful interview with The Weekly. “It’s like, come on, we pay you thousands. Thousands and thousands. You should at least read your notes before I walk into your consult room.”
It may seem like a small oversight made by a busy doctor, but this incident was part of a frustrating pattern that left Jessica feeling like she was a “uterus on a conveyor belt”. The rigours of IVF – the hormone treatment, the hidden costs, the disappointment and what she describes as a lack of information, compassion and support – have left her feeling depressed, anxious and at times, even suicidal.
“I just lost the ability to function,” she says. “It was pretty full-on, and it
