As someone facing infertility or other family building challenges, you may be experiencing a grief response, a trauma response, or both. You may notice elevated anxiety, changes to your self-image and self-worth, and/or challenges in your relationship and support network as a result of your reproductive trauma. Additionally, the losses associated with infertility are typically invisible to people who haven’t experienced it, and our society does not deem grief about infertility and family building challenges as socially acceptable or worthy of being openly acknowledged and grieved (called disenfranchised grief).

If you have lost a pregnancy or a baby, then you know how commonly other people misunderstand, minimize, and ignore this type of loss. Like infertility, our society often does not consider pregnancy loss and infant loss as socially acceptable or worthy of being openly acknowledged and grieved (called disenfranchised grief). This is especially true for early pregnancy loss and termination for medical reasons. Even the people who love and care for you may not know what to say, and their words may come off as dismissive or hurtful. You may be feeling isolated, overwhelmed, anxious, sad, numb, or stuck as you try to wade through the waves of grief.

You’re feeling exhausted and questioning your ability to emotionally, mentally, or physically continue your family building efforts. Maybe you’ve gone through IUI or IVF multiple times without success. Or perhaps you haven’t experienced trouble getting pregnant, but you’ve experienced multiple miscarriages and feel unable to continue TTC. Perhaps you’ve explored other paths to family building, such as private adoption, adoption from the foster care system, donor-assisted conception, and gestational surrogacy, but none of these paths felt right to you. Or maybe these family building paths are out-of-reach due to finances or other obstacles. There can be such grief with ending your family building efforts, even if it feels like the right decision or if the decision has been made for you.

You may feel like the legacy of infertility and loss continues to impact you, even after experiencing pregnancy or having a child. For example, this could look like heightened anxiety during pregnancy and postpartum for parents who needed assistance to conceive (such as IVF, a donor, or a gestational carrier) or who experienced prior loss (such as a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, or a stillbirth). During pregnancy and postpartum, parents who conceived with assistance may feel a lot of pressure to be “grateful” and “perfect” parents to the child for whom they have longed.