Gerad Kite - The Art of Baby Making--The Holistic Approach to Fertility

Our love of babies and instinctive need to procreate are the most powerful driving forces of humanity. The desire to see the next generation flourish is hardwired into our DNA and even those of us who, for whatever reason, do not have children, depend on and enjoy what the next generation brings. In recent years, troubled by falling fertility rates, we humans have started to dabble in the baby-making business. Western medicine has decided that infertility is a modern problem in need of a modern solution. Yet, when it comes to baby-making we really are amateurs; nature has been doing this job since the beginning of time.

The Art of Baby-Making invites you to look at fertility and conception in a positive new light. This book is about all people, and not just those who want to have children. The issues surrounding this epidemic of infertility are far bigger than you might think. Theyre a reflection of the quality of life, not just of prospective parents but of humanity in general. As modern life provides for our every material need and technology brings the world directly into our homes, our creativity and discovery of self are starting to be seriously compromised. We are less in touch with nature than ever before.

For almost 30 years Ive been working with both men and women in all kinds of relationships who have not been able to conceive and realise a child of their own. For many this journey is painful, frustrating and deeply saddening, but worst of all, it often gives people a great sense of injustice, as though theyve been shut out of a normal life excluded from the great plan of procreation through no apparent fault of their own. Such a profound sense of hopelessness touches a deep and dark part of us, and reminds us of the pain of feeling separate from others and different.

Everyone has a unique experience. Ive worked with people who have damaged fallopian tubes or low sperm counts, and with people who struggled with long-term physical health problems that they thought were unrelated to their infertility. Often theres something emotional or psychological that is getting in the way.

My husband and I had a vision of having kids and a family and we assumed it would happen the natural, easy way, and when it didnt it was a big shock. It was hard for me to get my head round it and work out what we could do next. Its hard on your relationship because you have to re-evaluate almost every aspect of what you are together. J OANNE

The UK has a Fertility Industry worth more than 600m a year, with one in six couples facing fertility problems in some form. There are 85 licensed medical clinics in the UK offering services such as in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), egg donation, sperm donation and even treatments to suppress a womans immune system in case its attacking newly implanted embryos. You can take special fertility supplements made of high-dose vitamins or algae, or stock up with homeopathic remedies and follow a diet calculated to maximise your baby-making potential. There are travel companies offering fertility retreats where couples have massages and do yoga and qi gong.

Once a year at Olympia in London you can attend the Fertility Show where many of the clinics and practitioners specialising in fertility have stands and give out leaflets. You see bedraggled, dazzled-looking couples wandering around with handfuls of leaflets, trying to get their heads round competing packages of treatments and counselling and pampering. You can even have a fertility horoscope drawn up to calculate the right time to have sex and conceive.

Meanwhile the headlines bring new scare stories every day: Sperm counts falling!, Are women leaving it too late to have a baby?, IVF babies born with fertility problems!, Are you secretly infertile and dont know it?, Infertility epidemic sweeps the Western world!. Friends suggest old wives-tales standing on your head after sex or eating kiwi fruit because its good for fertility and your mum mutters that they didnt have these problems in her day and a colleague at work unhelpfully says she only has to look at her husband to get pregnant.

The awful thing about infertility is you feel very unfeminine when everyone else is getting pregnant and you cant. It makes you feel like a complete failure as a woman. You feel very guilty that youre doing something bad and thats why its not working. You think if only Id had that vitamin or if I hadnt had that stressful phone conversation half an hour before the treatment. You become paranoid about everything that you do. E LIZABETH

It can be the hardest thing in the world when people turn round and say, Look at your daughter shes so beautiful and youre so blessed to have her, while theyre surrounded by their three children, and you almost want to ask them how theyd react if one of their children were taken away from them. Secondary infertility is hard because you know what youre missing. These little beings are such cherubs. It can be difficult to realise that you wont do what you always thought you would, and have more, so you will literally do anything to change that. V ALERIE

In the middle of this onslaught of advice and advertising and recommendations and counter-recommendations, its hard to know how to stand back and calmly decide what you want to do when you are having difficulty conceiving, especially when your emotions are running high. What should be the simplest thing in the world has suddenly become a maze of options.

People with infertility issues often find themselves on a conveyor belt of treatment: first, when trying to conceive naturally fails, they are tested and diagnosed, then they are put on drugs to enhance ovulation. Then theres intra-uterine insemination (IUI), to give nature another helping hand, and if and when that fails, IVF and then ICSI, when a single sperm is injected directly into a waiting egg in a petri dish, and the resulting embryo returned to the mother for implantation.

If several cycles fail, one can look into egg or sperm donation an option complicated by a shortage of donors and difficulties with implantation or begin, belatedly and in a demoralised state, the long path to adopting a child.

Over the years Ive worked with a huge number of patients who have had children after reaching one stage or the next of this conveyor belt and, while I think theres nothing wrong with offering medical help to couples who have difficulty conceiving, sometimes this kind of intervention wasnt needed in the first place. The achievements of modern medicine can be little short of miraculous (and many of the people I see come for acupuncture while they go through a process like IVF or ICSI or the implantation of a donor egg), but I do believe that many of these clinics dont take into account the whole person, at great cost.

The majority have a very linear, logical approach, which deals only with the basic mechanics of introducing gamete to gamete and hoping that they take and it can leave the newly dubbed patients feeling dispirited and hollow. Theyve been sidelined as a couple, and theyre sick or faulty and mysteriously wrong when theyd thought they felt well in themselves only a few months before.

In 2010 the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority reported that only 32.2 per cent of IVF cycles performed on women under the age of 35 ended in the birth of a baby. For older women, the success rate was still worse. There is a great deal of mystery around the low success rate of IVF, even when healthy embryos are created for implantation. Its understandable that were so concerned about infertility being epidemic, and that medical treatment isnt a guaranteed solution.