During early IVF treatment, Shelby Hill figured her colleagues knew something was up, thanks to her hormone injections.
She turned to Instagram, searching for IVF hashtags and accounts for people going through what can be a notoriously stressful process.“I found a bit of a community on there and started sharing my infertility and IVF journey. I feel like I got some confidence there,” said Hill, who is now pregnant with her second IVF-assisted baby.
“It was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. You just felt like you could be yourself and just cry when you needed to cry. You weren’t needing to hide it,” she said.“An older man in my team actually reached out to me and said, ‘I can understand what you’re going through because my wife and I did IVF 30 years ago’. He had kept it to himself and is the kind of person I never knew would have been through something like that.
“We hope that stigma is going but still in a lot of workplaces, the perception is there will be prejudice against [patients’] career promotion,” she said. “We also see celebrities talking about their experience and sharing photos and advice, and that also empowers women.”
wtuohy It’s a little bit ironic being worried about discussing fertility issues in the office when in many cases it’s the office that caused it. Women put their 9-5 cubicle careers first and motherhood second. Women are most fertile in their 20s. Fertility drops rapidly after 35!