In Vitro Fertility Goddess
Tale of heartbreak, hope and humour
by Michael Jacobson, Books Editor, Weekend Bulletin
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For the lucky ones, becoming parents poses few dilemmas. Brimming with fertility, they require only the desire and the decision.
Unfortunately, the above scenario does not describe the experience of author Jodi Panayotov and her husband Michel. As much as they possessed the desire and were at a time in their lives and careers when they felt ready to raise a baby. Jodi's body let her down.
She was in her mid-thirties, as she puts it in her moving, funny and very real story ‘In Vitro Fertility Goddess', "I discovered that my fertility had packed its bags and taken off to an unknown destination."
Jodi's book begins with a loss in the form of her first miscarriage, the tragedy compounded when the only hospital bed available was in the maternity wing. "I got to cry all night in unison with the newborns," she writes.
Though shattered, a sensation they would endure again and again, the Panayotovs refused to give in. Jodi recalls their emotional ordeal with admirable humour.
"Do you keep a basal thermometer by your bed as an object of foreplay?" she asks. "Do you spend an abnormal amount of time in your bedroom upside down? Are you increasingly of the opinion that there are two types of people in the world - the fertile and the infertile?"
Despite their determination, the Panayotovs conceived only one more sadness, guilt and in Jodi's tongue-in-cheek words, homicidal urges towards mothers. In the end, IVF treatment loomed as their only option.
IVF, says Jodi, is the new black. "Once the domain of a few well heeled older career women, now women of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds are turning to it as fertility rates fall and infertility rates climb," she writes.
"In previous times, it was a hush-hush thing, not to be discussed. Now the Internet is awash with women trawling the infertility sites at all hours of the day and night. Entire communities, even societies, are being formed in cyberspace and IVF is the hot topic, the strongest link.
"IVF is like the little black dress, the one size fits all approach to infertility although, like the little black dress, it cannot compensate for all ills. Like the LBD, when you resort to when nothing else suits, IVF is what women turn to when in doubt or when all else fails."
Speaking from the home she shares with her husband and their IVF miracle daughter, Jodi says she hopes her book will empower women enduring what she did and help them stop feeling embarrassed or ashamed.
"When you can't conceive, or when you do conceive and then miscarry, you do feel guilty" she says. "You begin to blame yourself, punish yourself, and that only adds to the pressure. It's an insidious situation and, with one in six Australian couples affected, it's a common one."
That situation isn't aided by the so-called ‘having it all' mentality rife today and which imposes particular pressure on women. Jodi calls it the fertility lie.
To have it all she says, conveys the impression that a woman can burn her bra, sleep around while taking a liberating contraceptive pill that allows the option of sleeping/working her way to the top, fall pregnant in the throes of multiple orgasm sex at the age of 36 onwards and schedule the birth of a carefully chosen gender baby between board meetings while her husband cooks dinner.
"Unfortunately", she says, "90 per cent of similar-age women are not so lucky. We were sold something that nobody had tried out."
In Vitro Fertility blends personal experience, social research and cultural observation. Jodi's journey to pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood takes many sidetracks and introduces just as many characters including a famous herbalist, a gay gynaecologist and a one-legged psychiatrist.
The result is a book that is explicit, entertaining, enlightening and much more than a memoir about one couple's determination to have a baby. It is in fact a love story, an adventure and a mystery. And just as their little girl was the gift the Panayotov's craved, In Vitro Fertility Goddess is another gift, one with a message for existing parents and, most importantly, the hopeful ones making their own difficult journey.
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