大象传媒

From Rae Duke, Religion and Ethics teacher and broadcaster.

I always used to think the adverts featuring a couple shrieking for joy, tears in their eyes, brandishing a positive pregnancy stick were a little cheesy.聽 That was until it was me and my husband with our very own good-news revealing stick. We were every bit as cringe as the couples in those ads.

Because getting pregnant, of course, is no mean feat. It can be a long and angst-filled road, testing every iota of that virtue of patience you鈥檝e got.

With this week being Fertility Week, a time to put a media spotlight on the struggles so many face to have a baby, we can readdress the bizarre fact that so much of our conversation around becoming parents begins with those two pink lines on a stick and not the convoluted path leading up to them. With 1 in 6 couples in the UK facing difficulties with fertility, it鈥檚 something that鈥檒l touch many lives. And given the recent study showing that coping with infertility is as stressful as a cancer diagnosis, our open sharing of this issue couldn鈥檛 be more important.聽

Everybody鈥檚 challenge looks a little different. I was so moved yesterday to hear Sheridan鈥檚 story of finding unexpected purpose after a time of such grief. For us, our worry was about the science of DNA and whether my husband might pass on the genetic condition of albinism to our child. It鈥檚 something he lives with each day, impairing his vision significantly. But after looking into it, we discovered there wasn鈥檛 really an option to ensure the faulty genes wouldn鈥檛 make it into our baby. We simply had to go for it, keeping faith that, as Julian of Norwich wrote so beautifully - in the earliest surviving English book written by a woman (!) - 鈥渁ll shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.鈥�

We were lucky. And I鈥檓 grateful every day for a healthy daughter. But the trying-to-conceive days, pregnancy and birth era being the time of heightened sensitivity they are, I truly feel the pain and frustration of those still working through it.

For those whom the light at the end of the tunnel seems miles off, the words of Martin Luther King are pretty wonderful: 鈥渨e must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.鈥�