One in eight couples suffers from infertility in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
My husband and I are that one in eight.
When we decided to start our family in 2017, I was 29 years old and expected that having children was par for the course after I got married. We soon discovered that I had a low ovarian egg reserve and my husband had poor sperm count and quality.
For the next 18 months, we went through some of the most challenging moments of our marriage. At times I didn’t think we would stay together. It nearly broke us.
We ended up doing two rounds of in vitro fertilization, more commonly known as IVF. One round was covered by my company’s insurance, but the other was not, since I had exhausted all my benefits with the first round. Throughout our process, we received questions from family and friends such as, “How are you paying for this? Isn’t it expensive?”
That got me thinking.
