Rimma Efimkina - Not pregnant yet? You bet!

I guess, Lida also needed to get there. I didn’t hear from her for a long time, and then I got an email from her:

“It’s been three years since I moved. Several days ago I heard that you were planning on visiting our city. I was reviewing the program for the conference and found your theme. I would be glad to see you if you have time”.

I used this opportunity to ask about the children. Lida said that her husband and she got divorced as he left her “for a twenty-four year old”; that she does not have children, she was “married to her work”. Sometimes she was perfectly happy, sometimes she missed Siberia, her friends. She bought an apartment, she took a mortgage. She joked about this: “In Russia we exchanged death penalty for mortgage”.

In a couple of years I received one more message from Lida:

“You may congratulate me on a new husband!”

“Yes, I got that already, congratulations! And on the new second name as well!”

And finally, the long expected message:

“Hello, Rimma. I wanted to boast to you that I gave birth to a boy. I know you will be glad for me. Now I cannot imagine how I lived without him all these years”.

“Lida, all these years I was afraid to ask you if you had children? I remember you session on this subject. Was it IVF or you made it on your own? I’m not just glad, I’m happy!!! I have a grandson, he is six months, it’s a bliss!”

“Yes, I saw the photos of your grandson, he is great! I had IVF done in Moscow, my second husband literary forced me to go through with it. I didn’t even dream of it, I just lived enjoying my life. I gave birth on my own, I tried so hard and listened to what doctors told me to do. When I was pregnant, I read my notes of your lectures on developmental psychology, I try not to become a “crazy mommy”.

Now I think I didn’t just have to go through it all, but I have also truly accept this, so that the pain stopped being so painful, pity dissolved in love and all of this became my valuable experience. I am very grateful to God and to doctors”.

Skeptics might say that this is the case when no psychotherapy worked. What did work was the infamous IVF and there were no negative consequences! It is both so and not so. Yes, IVF did work, I’m very happy for Lida. However, now it is not the same Lida who once addressed the doctors for the first time about her regular sex life with one partner for two years not resulting in pregnancy. The girl was healthy at that point, at least physically. Usually, sterility in such cases is a result of subconscious wish not to have a baby for some reason. In Lida’s case I suppose it was due to her unconscious wish to push aside the problems of her five relatives who behaved like babies and take care of her own baby in her own family. This desire conflicted with the mistrust to her partner on whom, as Lida had guessed, she could not rely on. Later this lack of trust was confirmed when her husband left her for another woman.

If we turn back to the moment when Lida went to doctors, one can only regret that she had a wrong address: as we all remember, medical procedures did not bring the desired results. What she did need at that point was to see her controversial situation. However, medical system gives a chance to every customer who is healthy enough (I remind you that it “helps” not ill women, but healthy women who made it through numerous difficult tests!) to undergo standard methods that are useless in the best case scenario, and it the worst case scenario they damaging to women’s health.

Robert Mendelsohn is sure that treating patients with today’s standard medical methods can seldom be effective, it is often more dangerous than the disease it is supposed to treat. It happens because modern medicine went too far using the methods designed for extreme situations on daily basis. Should we be surprised that when we come to a doctor we are treated not like a person who needs help, but rather like a potential consumer of miracle factory products? 30 30 Robert Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic. There is some bitter irony in the fact that the doctor is perfectly aware of the cost of these modern and useless procedures!

Why did IVF worked when Lida’s body was deprived of the ability to function naturally because of all the interventions? Why hadn’t it worked before? Unlike women who spend their lives in a race for conception, Lida accepted her life and everything in it. She didn’t bet on becoming a mother in her second marriage, her life was filled with her art. If that try wasn’t a success it wouldn’t have broken her heart and wouldn’t have bankrupted her emotionally. The thing is that the procedure is useless, if a woman is not ready to open herself to new experience. It’s not the procedure that causes the problems, but the state on one’s mind. Conscious choice does not equal the choice made out of fear and desperation. It is totally different.

Angela, a thirty year old woman, has endometriosis, she has IVF done for free due to the federal program. She has already had two unsuccessful tries, although the third one was made just two days ago she knows in advance that the embryo won’t survive. Of all the eggs they had only one was fertilized and it was underdeveloped: instead of dividing eight times by a certain moment, it divided only three times. Embryo specialist said not to give it much hope.

But Angela came with a different problem. She was highly impressed by a handsome doctor who performed the IVF. When he had his job done, he said: “You’ll spend this night with me”. The ambiguity of his words and his tone caused confusion in her mind.

– Can you imagine? He didn’t say “You will stay in the hospital till tomorrow”, he said “You’ll spend this night with me”! – told Angela excitedly. – If he only asked me, if he only gave me a hint, I would have given it to him without giving it much thought!

Angela looks in front of her as if not seeing anything, rubs her temples and says frustrated:

– But I’m happily married, my husband is such a nice guy, we are so close! Can you explain what is the deal with this obsession?

I have thought about this frequently, as a matter of fact. I mean, about in vitro fertilization. The process that is deeply personal, spiritual and sexual that joins two people as one and makes them parents, becomes distant and impersonal inside a hospital. There is no passion-charged field necessary to conceive new life in the mechanical procedure.

Is it possible that the feelings Angela told me about are normal in an un-normal situation? And she tries to compensate it with her behavior? I don’t know the answer, but nothing prevents me from assuming it. The man who fertilized the egg and put the embryo in is a part of the sacrament now. He becomes very close, but he is still a stranger. How a woman is supposed to overcome this estrangement and resolve the conflict between the two roles he performs: a doctor and a participant of bringing new life into this world? Unconsciously Angela found a way: to fall in love with him to humanize the process of in vitro fertilization.

I totally agree with Jeremy Taylor when he says that each of us is born as a result of a sexual contact, so in this sense sexuality deeply resonates with religious and philosophical problems. So, modern procedures, such as artificial insemination, amniocentesis 31 31 Amniocentesis (also referred to as amniotic fluid test) is a medical procedure used in prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities and fetal infections, and also for sex determination, in which a small amount of amniotic fluid, which contains fetal tissues, is sampled from the amniotic sac surrounding a developing fetus, and then the fetal DNA is examined for genetic abnormalities. , ability to determine the sex of a baby and possible abnormalities, in vitro fertilization, complicated devices for maintaining life that allow to “give birth to an embryo” without growing it in mother’s uterus, have created moral dilemmas that can’t be solved, unless the un-measurable elements of human life are considered as real and important as the devices that make these procedures possible 32 32 Jeremy Taylor, The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life . .