Consuming Life
Human beings are so supremely suggestible. We are so vulnerable to being manipulated. We seem to invite interference in our lives, to tolerate, even welcome intrusions in our most private and intimate thoughts and feelings. Nothing is too sacrosanct from the invasion of entrepreneurs who claim they have the means to fulfill our most ardent desires.Consumables of all kinds are there for the taking, and whether they fill a required niche in our lives or not, they represent "must-haves" because advertising informs us that our lives will be incomplete without them. Take, for example, childless couples who feel their lives to be incomplete without the eventual appearance of children to round out their familial intent and aspirations. Their absence is a source of real sorrow for those incapable of conceiving.
That's the developed world, where increasingly people have more disposable income than ever before. Where a great and ever-burgeoning upper middle-class considers as mundane and basic a style of living never thought possible by their forebears. European or Caribbean vacations, not merely in the summer, but during March break when the children are out of school. Backyard in-ground swimming pools. Four-bedroom, great-room, four-bathroom houses.
Not to be seen side-by-side with what pertains as normal and even desirable in developing countries. Those countries of the world where people barely have sufficient to support themselves, let alone a growing brood of children they seem incapable of controlling through birth control. But then, such a large percentage of very young children die well before they reach five years of age, and those that survive will be responsible in young adulthood, for the support of their parents.
In the developed world children have become less prevalent in society, as educated and professional families simply have fewer of them. Where countries like Canada experience greater numbers of funerals than live births. Children are valued for the status they convey among some women who see them as a completion of their destiny, while other women consider their offspring to be impediments to their aspirations as professionals, and barely tolerate their presence, shuffling them off to the care of paid parental surrogates.
And isn't life just like that? The people who really want children because they want to love them, enjoy their development, make every conceivable sacrifice to ensure they are emotionally secure and intellectually inspired, seem to be the people who for one reason or another, are unable to conceive. While the people for whom having a family replete with children is just something that happens, and they make the best of it - have no trouble at all conceiving. Or so it would often seem.
Couples for whom conception simply hasn't occurred either accept the inevitable, and keep trying, or become desperately involved in searching out alternative and meagerly successful means of conception. Medical science has done its part in attempting to solve the problems of infertility in males and females. And sometimes there appears to be no medically identifiable reason why a couple remains infertile. To them are offered alternative methods of attempting conception.
Legally approved drugs, and artificial insemination as modes of treatment, not by any means always successful. But still realizing a modicum of success, in the low double-digit percentile. These are seen to be relatively inexpensive treatments, not involving the more serious and expensive treatment involving time, energy and determination, often resulting in disappointment when IVF does not work.
Now researchers from the universities of Aberdeen and Oxford along with hospitals in Edinburgh, Dundee, Falkirk and Glasgow have published the results of research, in the British Medical Journal, questioning not only the presumed efficacy of the expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes painful stimulation of a woman's ovaries to achieve conception, but the value in total of prescribing it.
Their research appears to conclude that women left to continue attempting natural conception, and another group prescribed climifene citrate which is used to correct subtle ovulatory dysfunction, reaches a similar success rate as the intrusive, expensive method, around which an entire medical-conception industry reaping its practitioners huge heaps of money has obtained.
Clinics which specialize in the extremely expensive, and most often publicly-paid for procedure whereby a woman's eggs are collected, fertilized outside the body, then returned to the womb do a booming business. Their services are widely advertised to desperate couples wanting to have children, living their little hells of dissatisfaction of life's unfairness. Public relations claims for success entice women who are informed they still have a chance for success.
Yet the alternate methods, including IUI, which enhances the chance of pregnancy by injecting sperm behind the cervical barrier, seem to be just as successful as IVF. We remain, as an entitled group of people, dissatisfied with our lives, regardless, it seems, of how they evolve. If and when we perceive ourselves to have been ill dealt with by fate, we seek out remedies, not always practical, even minimally promising.
None are too costly, too time-consuming, life-disrupting, to attain our ends. Particularly when the process is supported by public funding. And that's another story; publicly funded medicine is meant to solve medical crises, to aid and to heal human frailties and disease. To view parenthood as an assured entitlement is questionable to begin with. Yet there are those who feel resolutely entitled to aspire to parenthood even if nature tells them otherwise.
Well, the good thing about all of this is the encouragement to keep trying. Through the natural process. That promises a whole lot of recreation time, doesn't it?
Labels: Realities, That's Life
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 09, 2008
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