- [Woman] All girls are born with a special place
in their bodies where babies can grow called the uterus.
- There's one thing those old sex ed videos and classes
didn't teach the potential parents watching them.
Getting pregnant is hard.
(up-tempo instrumental music)
How many years did it take you to have your children?
- Six years.
Personally, I think I was at my complete,
at the end of my rope,
and as a couple it just was very hard on us.
- One in eight couples has trouble conceiving
or sustaining a pregnancy.
Infertility is common.
It affects millions of people
and it doesn't discriminate based on gender.
Sure, the government's website
about infertility has the phrase women's health in its URL,
but a third of infertility problems are due to men,
a third to women, and the remainder,
they're due to a combination of the previous two,
or they're unexplained.
But there's something else you may not know.
Race is having a real impact on fertility in the U.S.
- Most people think that infertility
is a rich white woman's disease or a diagnosis.
It's very few people who are being honest about the fact
that this is an issue
that Black women are dealing with.
- Hey fam, I'm Imaeyen, and I want you to hit
that subscribe button right now,
because today we're tackling a subject
that's important but sensitive: infertility.
We're gonna uncover how the social construct
of race ended up having very real life implications
on the fertility process.
Spoiler alert!
You're going to learn how one grandmother gave birth
to not one but three of her own grandchildren.
(slow pensive music)
- Yeah.
- Get down.
(Camille cheers)
- Go Redwings!
- It's the second Sunday in June
and the Hammonds are immersed
in their usual weekend routine, travel baseball.
(gentle percussion music)
They're literally watching their dreams
that turned into reality.
What's it like to see your children playing baseball,
given all that it took to bring them into this world?
- It is joy.
It is pure joy on Saturday and Sunday
when I get to sit out in the field
and just cheer and be mom
and just know that these are my miracle babies,
but they're real.
It's a blessing.
- [Imaeyen] These moments, this game,
(Camille cheers)
these children.
They are things Hammond couldn't be sure
would be a part of her life.
That's because the doctor is one of the more
than six million American women infertility affects.
- I felt like my body, my uterus,
was created to do one job, and it failed at that,
and I stayed mad at my uterus for a season.
I spent some time trying to reconcile
why my body had betrayed me.
- [Imaeyen] Her fertility struggles impacted her so much,
she wrote two books about it, including this one.
- [Camille] Getting pregnant and having kids
should be fun and easy, right?
What happens when it isn't though?
- But in order to understand what it's like
to live with infertility,
you first have to know its definition.
Infertility is a reproductive disorder
where 12 months of regular unprotected sex fails
to result in a pregnancy.
Now, that's only if you're younger than 35.
For women older than that,
the time period is much shorter, six months.
Making a baby is more difficult than many realize.
The recipe for making a baby is extremely specific.
In fact everything has to be exactly right
to make sure it happens.
Let me show you.
First, you'll need to make sure you have
all the right ingredients.
That means: good quality eggs, healthy sperm and a uterus.
You'll also have to be sure that you're trying
to conceive during the exact right time of the month.
It's a very specific window, and it's brief.
(upbeat percussion music)
Ew, oh.
(Imaeyen laughs)
(bell ringing)
Oh, now we're ready.
The process begins with something called ovulation.
That's when the ovaries release an egg,
and that egg then makes its way down the fallopian tube
to the uterus.
(egg cracking)
A person is most likely to become pregnant
in the days just before, during or after ovulation.
Even then you'll still have
to make sure you have a healthy amount
of sperm with the right mobility and shape
to make it to the egg and then one to fertilize it.
And if everything works, when these things combine,
you get a baby.
There's so many things
that make the already narrow conception process
even more difficult.
Age, lifestlye habits, general health.
For Hammond, it was the incredibly painful uterine condition
known as endometriosis,
which made her pregnancy pursuits more complicated.
- We started having IVF and about six cycles later,
when I had not yet conceived,
we were told that we needed to consider either adoption
or a gestational carrier,
because even though I was young and healthy,
there was no reason to believe
that if we continued to do the same thing,
that we would get a different result.
- [Imaeyen] Today, treatments like in vitro fertilization,
also known as IVF,
are more common than they were decades ago.
Whether you know it or not,
you may even know someone who's used them.
Nearly a third of U.S. adults
have either used a fertility treatment
or know someone who has.
- [Reporter] How's Louise, Mrs. Brown?
(cameras clicking)
- The world's first baby conceived using IVF
was born in July 1978, and she was a precursor
to the at least 8 million children born using the procedure.
But IVF treatment doesn't guarantee a pregnancy.
Its success rate is 50% at age 30,
21% for women in their late 30s,
and it decreases even more when women hit their 40s.
Fertility experts told me age
was the number one factor in determining the success of IVF.
But there's something else I was surprised
to uncover about the lengthy, multi-step process.
The procedure is less successful for African American women
than it is for white women, according to a 2018 study.
Researchers couldn't determine why this was true,
and this study, it's not the only place
where we see disparities when we look at fertility stats
and filter them by race.
For example, the states with the best fertility stats,
they're not the same for all women,
and that was something I was surprised to find
when I was researching this story.
While South Dakota has the highest overall fertility rate,
and Washington DC has the overall lowest,
the results change when we factor in race.
White women have the highest rates of fertility in Utah.
It's Alabama for Hispanic women, and Maine,
a state whose entire Black population makes up less than 2%,
is the state with the highest fertility rate
for Black women.
These statistics sit against a backdrop
where the United States
is experiencing record low fertility rates.
Now researchers say some of this can be attributed
to the fact that people are waiting longer to have children,
but what about the racial disparities we're seeing?
Trying to uncover the answer to that question led me
to the University of Michigan,
where I found one woman who could give me some insight.
- The leading cause of hysterectomies
in the United States is uterine fibroids,
and it affects women of color most
because women of color are more likely
to suffer from uterine fibroids.
- [Imaeyen] Rosario Ceballo has dedicated part of her career
to investigating the intersection of race and infertility,
and she's a researcher with a personal connection
to this issue.
At least one of her family members struggled
with infertility without telling anyone.
- The family story was that,
oh, she was too busy with her education and her career.
She didn't want children.
Just a few months ago we learned that wasn't the real story.
The real story was that they were trying
for years and years and years to conceive.
- [Imaeyen] Ceballo wants science and academia
to have more representation
of women of color in fertility research
to attain a greater understanding of the condition.
- The people who are most affected by infertility
were not being asked to be part of the research
and part of our endeavors to learn more about
how infertility affected women and affected couples.
- You also did a study on doctors, correct?
- Yeah.
- What did you find that the doctors knew
or didn't know about women of color and fertility?
- They assumed that infertility influenced white women
more so than African American women.
- And that's really important,
because remember what I told you earlier,
age is a huge factor in fertility,
so a later diagnosis could lead to reduced options.
Ceballo already has begun to do the work she'd like to see.
She conducted a qualitative study
of Black women living with infertility,
some of whom had spent
more than a decade trying to conceive.
- Amongst the 50 women who I talked to,
only two had tried IVF,
so most of the women had not done very intensive,
very expensive medical treatments,
and the most significant finding amongst the woman
who I talked to was the profound sense
of loneliness, silence and isolation.
It was incredible to me how many of the women said to me
that I was the first person that they had talked to.
- Her results mirror national stats
about race and fertility.
White people dealing with infertility are much more likely
than Black or Hispanic people
to report they've had fertility treatments,
or know someone who has.
Another thing Ceballo's work showed
was how much impact class had, or in this case, didn't have,
in the Black women she was studying.
- What I found is the lack of agency
in medical settings cut across social class lines.
It cut across educational level.
- And then there's the information Ceballo told me,
which echoed some of the thoughts
of the Black women I interviewed for this story.
- There is, has always been,
a myth that Black women are super fertile.
Somehow, somebody has to just look at us,
and we get pregnant.
- The stereotype of Black women being exceptionally fertile,
leaves Black women struggling with infertility,
gasping for help.
It's an inaccurate belief rooted
in the racist history of slavery,
the one-time economic engine of the United States.
Black women's fertility was fundamental
to the financial stability of the country.
- When people of African descent
were brought to North America,
our ability to breed was very significant
because it impacted the economy,
because they needed a lot of Black women
and men and children in order to take care of the economy,
the land, the plantations, etc.
If they were found to be infertile,
there were consequences for that.
- [Imaeyen] Stacey Edwards-Dunn is a woman
who spent seven years trying to conceive.
She began her journey in 2007,
almost immediately after she got married.
She and her husband were dealing
with female and male factor infertility,
so they began a lengthy journey to parenthood.
- The IVF process is an emotional roller coaster.
It's so many feelings that you experience
as a woman who struggles with infertility,
and go through the IVF process,
sometimes it's even hard to put words
to that particular process as well.
- [Imaeyen] Even as she tried dealing
with her fertility problems,
Edwards-Dunn was counseling women
in her church with similar troubles,
none of whom initially knew she shared their pain.
- As I look back,
I think there was some shame even on my part,
that as minister, I was praying for all these people,
and working with all these people,
and I was able to help them get babies here,
but here it was that I was this minister,
and I was not able to get pregnant.
So I didn't want anybody in my business.
- [Imaeyen] For a time it put a strain on her marriage,
but on their seventh IVF attempt,
Edwards-Dunn became pregnant with their daughter.
Today Shiloh is four years old
and Edwards-Dunn has never forgotten the work it took
to get her to motherhood, or how difficult it was
to navigate that journey as a Black woman.
(child laughing)
In March 2013 she started Fertility for Colored Girls,
a nonprofit that provides educational,
financial and emotional support to African American women
and couples experiencing infertility.
- Women of color needed a place, a safe space,
where they could share their heart,
where they would not be critiqued or judged
for their unique experiences that they went through,
particularly around infertility,
and that was the purpose of Fertility for Colored Girls.
- Her organization has distributed tens
of thousands of dollars,
and she says Fertility for Colored Girls
has brought more than 200 children to wannabe parents.
Her path mirrors Hammond's.
Like Edwards-Dunn,
Hammond spent tens of thousands of dollars
in pursuit of motherhood.
Her price tag would have been much higher
if her post-menopausal mother hadn't volunteered
to carry her embryos.
Why would you volunteer to carry your daughter's baby?
- Well, I did it because she needed to have it done,
and I was going to be the best person to do it,
not because of my physical health,
but the knowledge that I would do everything I could
to hold onto the child that I hoped,
not to conceive, but to carry for her.
I considered myself to be a loving incubator.
- [Imaeyen] The loving incubator gave birth to not one,
but three grandchildren.
At age 55, Cade delivered triplets.
This is what those babies look like today at age 14,
on the verge of starting high school.
The birth story of Aaron, Kai and Simone
is the reason Hammond gave up practicing medicine
in order to create a foundation
to help others dealing with infertility.
She even named it after her mother.
On this Saturday in early June,
The Tinina Q. Cade Foundation is hosting a fundraiser
at the Maryland Zoo.
♪ For the land of the free ♪
♪ And the home of the brave ♪
(crowd cheering and clapping)
- [Imaeyen] It is raffling off $10,000
in fertility treatments.
That's a substantial amount of money
for a process with an average cost of $25,000.
(crowd clapping)
- Congratulations, Travis.
(crowd clapping)
Is this for you or is this for someone else?
Okay, can she come up too?
(crowd clapping)
Come on now.
Lots of love, lots of hugs.
Congratulations.
- You could go through all this.
You could do the IVF, you can have your fertility tested,
you could pay all the money
and you could still not end up with a baby.
- And that's something that people need to know.
There's no guarantee,
but there's no guarantee with anything in life is there?
- No.
- You still try.
- Until when?
- Until you decide you want to give up,
but for some people that's not an option.
- Hey fam, thanks so much for watching.
Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe.
I learned so much while creating this video.
One of the most intriguing things
to me was really getting
to know the language surrounding fertility,
things like TTC - trying to conceive -
and IUI, which some of you may know -
Intrauterine insemination.
Please share your stories with me in the comments below.
I've added some links in the description.
Let me know what you want me to cover next
and I will be sure to see you next time.
Thank you so much for watching.