Fertility Treatment: Is the Bargain Worth It?

09.01.2010

To add to the long list of issues I already have, I now tack on one more: fertility treatments. And I’m deeply divided. I’ve always held my nose up at this but I’m aware how asinine that is especially because I can’t support my snobiness with anything other than a shrug and loud “harrumph.”

I still don’t really know where I stand, but catching about 10 minutes of that TLC show, Quintuplets By Surprise, I began to listen to my range of emotions. When it comes to finances, I have no sympathy for this family. They lost $90,000 worth of income last year and added $60,000 of expenses by having five babies. And these expenses are just for the basics, not counting the extra medical attention two of them need.

The reason they even got these five babies is because they wanted their daughter, also conceived through fertility treatments, to have a sibling. This is often the case. Parents go in wanting one more child and get double, triple or more what they bargained for. Why? If conceiving the first child was so difficult, why chance getting twins, triplets, etc knowing that the cost, energy, and sanity will cost that same amount? And the “you don’t have kids so you don’t understand” won’t garner any sympathy from me either. You already have a kid, right? Is it like everything else in our society: one is not enough?

But let's flip it, who am I to say that a couple who can conceive naturally can have more than one kid while others can’t? That’s not fair. I acknowledge that.

And what about those women who are like me and wait to have a kid when they are older and conceiving may become more difficult? Choosing to wait for financial reasons, for emotional reasons and for maturity reasons becomes a punishment later in life when the chances of conceiving drop over 30%. Should there not be fertility treatments to help older women have a baby? Part of me says that if it’s meant to happen naturally then it will and let nature take her course. It seems like one unnecessarily complicates his/her life by going in with the intentions of conceiving one kid and coming out with five.

I don’t know what I would do and I can only hope that I don’t have to face that decision should we decide to start trying and things don’t happen. Being my age, childless and confused with time pressing only forward is difficult… Incredibly difficult and quite often very lonesome because we only hear from women who seem to never doubt the fact that all they ever wanted was to have a kid and wasted no time getting to that stage of their life. Would I trade my 20s and 30s for a kid? No. Is this fair? No. Will I be OK if we want kids and can't have them? I don't know.

Something Stinks

07.08.2010

At the beginning of the year when Rob and I were talking seriously about the possibility of starting a family this year, we gave each other tasks to do (like research) and agreed to regroup and discuss if this is something that we want to do. He decided to work out the finances and if it’s in the cards for us now and one of the things that I decided to look into was diapers and try to figure out a guesstimate cost per month. Being super environmentally conscious, I started with the brands at Whole Foods and compared prices. Let’s just start with the word “ridiculous.”

The 365 brand (Whole Foods’ brand) is priced at $11.99 per bag and 7^th Generation is at $12.99. You get a few more diapers per bag with 7^th Generation. But when you compare the 22-42 diapers per bag that you get (depending on baby’s weight) with regular store brand diapers, the price difference is astounding. Pampers, e.g. for the #3 size, you get 96 diapers for $19.99. Compare that to 38 for $11.99 for the 365 brand. This info really pissed me off because how, especially in an economic state that we’re in now, how do you make an easy choice to be more environmentally friendly? How do you convince someone that all the dyes and non-biodegradable material in Pampers isn’t worth it for the environment (or your baby’s butt) when you get so much more with them?

On top of that, a girl that I tutor discovered (via a science experiment) that the natural brand diapers aren’t as absorbent as the others. So you’re getting charged more for less. Interestingly, Huggies Pure and Natural is more expensive per diaper than 365 or 7th Generation. You get up to 12 diapers less per bag than you would with the Whole Foods brands.

My gripe is with the fact that there’s such great discouragement among companies to go more natural. It also pisses me off that Whole Foods charges so much when I know they could charge less. I used to work for Wild Oats and I know how high the mark-up is on products. I also know that there might be more of a process involved with all natural diapers, but I don’t think that there has to be such a huge discrepancy. I’ll pay more for organic produce because I don’t want to ingest pesticides if I can help it and organic produce will rot faster so there’s a premium placed; there’s more to lose. But diapers themselves don’t rot, so what the hell?

Anyone have any thoughts? What about diaper services for cloth diapers? I’m curious what other moms have to say about the exciting and dirty world of diapers.