Lena Dunham opens up about unsuccessful IVF journey and ‘giving up on motherhood’
Lena Dunham is opening up about her failed IVF journey in a brand new essay.
“For the last year I’ve been writing a piece for @harpersmagazine about the experience of learning, once and for all, that I would never be a biological mother — and about the Internet communities that I fell into when it felt like the world had no space [in real life] for the grief, pain and rage that comes along with processing something of this magnitude.“
The Girls creator and star, 34, wrote in the piece titled “False Labor: Giving up on motherhood,” that “the moment I lost my fertility” at age 31 when she had a full hysterectomy amid a decades-long battle with endometriosis — “I started searching for a baby.” It led to her first contemplating adoption, however then going all in with in vitro fertilization, which finally didn’t work as “none of my eggs were viable.”
She recalled the telephone name getting that upsetting information after the troublesome strategy of harvesting eggs.
“I learned that none of my eggs were viable on Memorial Day, in the midst of a global pandemic,” she wrote. “I was in Los Angeles when I got the call from Dr. Coperman, the slight Jewish man who was my entry into (and now exit from) the world of corporate reproduction….When he spoke my name with that sympathetic downturn, the apologetic-doctor voice I have come to know so well, my face crumpled in apprehension.”
She recalled being advised, “We were unable to fertilize any of the eggs. As you know, we had six. Five did not take. The one that did seems to have chromosomal issues and ultimately . . . ” She stated he “trailed off as I tried to picture it—the dark room, the glowing dish, the sperm meeting my dusty eggs so violently that they combusted. It was hard to understand that they were gone.”
She stated the physician promised to name again with the complete outcomes to “discuss my ‘remaining options,’ but he knew that I knew that there really weren’t any. The moment in time when I made those eggs was like a rip in the sky. It rained gold coins for a day. We brought out our buckets.”
Dunham additionally wrote about an additional kick within the face when “a few weeks after I found out that I would never become a biological mother, I started lactating.” Her buddy came visiting to indicate her “how to express the milk into a mug. It wasn’t much, but when it squirted I felt massive relief.”
Dunham documented the entire course of, which began proper after she had her uterus, cervix and one ovary eliminated. How “bedbound and tending to the five small laparoscopic holes in my abdomen, I scrolled through adoption websites as if they were furniture outlets.”
Amid the journey, she realized she had an addiction to benzodiazepines and went to rehab. Once she was sober, she threw herself into IVF, bonding with girls on-line going by the identical expertise, referred to as IVF Warriors. She at first was going to have a boyfriend — put up longtime accomplice Jack Antonoff — be the donor, then she thought of a sperm-donor buddy.
Her relationship with Antonoff, which resulted in 2018, was referenced within the piece.
“It’s wild how far you can drift from yourself in the process of trying to get what you want. What started as wanting to carry the child of the man I loved,” that means Antonoff, “became wanting to have a child with a man who was willing to help me have one. Soon that became hiring a lawyer to draft a contract for a sperm-donor friend and calling a surrogate who came highly recommended by another celebrity. I was forced to admit just how much of it was about finishing what I started. I tried to have a child. Along the way, my body broke. My relationship did, too.”
Dunham additionally wrote that “In the process — because of it? — I became a functional junkie. I had lost my way, and a half-dozen eggs sitting in Midtown promised to lead me home. Instead, each step took the process further from my body, my family, my reality. Each move was more expensive, more desperate, more lonely.”
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