Breaking the silence of IVF

IT took two-and-a-half years, seven stimulated cycles and 24 embryo transfers for her to fall pregnant. For months, Lahra Carey, who was in her early 30s, lived on a diet of “hope and despair”. She struggled to conceive and, with that, she recalls, came “a stigma, an awkwardness and a silent struggle”.

She stopped going to her friends’ birthday parties for their children she didn’t attend brit milahs or l’chaims. She became adept at making excuses and threw herself headlong into work.

But still the question begged: would she ever be able to start a family?

“The concept that we might never have a child was horrifying,” she says. “It was like being on a seesaw that I didn’t want to live on indefinitely, and that’s where I found myself,” Carey, 38, told the AJN. “I was getting older, all my friends were having children and there I was, holding a handbag and not a baby.”

During her struggle to conceive, Carey and her husband Ben Cowen were looking into their options and turned their attention to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) at a Melbourne clinic.

At the time, she described a “cone of silence” that hung over IVF, which further isolated the Jewish couple.

Read more at Breaking the silence of IVF