Dealing with infertility, IVF babies

Dr Swebby Macha says IVF is safe

DOREEN NAWA, Lusaka
JANET SINKALA sat at an interdenominational church gathering meeting in Lusaka at Government complex.
She tearfully explained her confusion over why she was struggling to conceive.
At first sight, she was hesitant to talk about her situation but after calming down, she opened up. She opted not to use her name and pictures.
She has been to several gynecologists, traditional healers and men of God in search of a solution to her predicament, all to no avail.
All her friends, she said, had fallen pregnant within months after getting married. Now she has separated herself from her friends for fear of being stressed over her failure to conceive.
Unfortunately, the Zambian tradition heaps the blame on the woman and not the husband, even when he has not fathered a child anywhere.
Mrs Sinkala says she has eaten healthy food and gone to the gym but she simply does not understand what is wrong with her.
Now her only option is to frequent church gatherings, hoping one day God will answer her prayer and she will conceive.
At the same time, desperation has not spared her.
First, she is in a panic about her age. She is getting on the wrong side of 35 and she feels it is too late for her to have her first child.
“I am worried about my status, we have tried everything as a couple and nothing seems to work. We went to various hospitals and my husband and I were told that we are all okay. We have resorted to seeking God’s guidance for this situation because we have tried all we can,” Mrs Sinkala says.
Asked whether she has tried In vitro fertilisation (IVF), she says the couple’s religious belief cannot allow such a process.IVF is a medical procedure whereby an egg is fertilised by sperm in a test tube or elsewhere outside the woman’s body.
“We have a friend who had suggested IVF for me and my husband but the option is what we cannot do because it conflicts with our belief. The challenge is that we do not know the donor of the sperm,” she says.
Mrs Sinkala praised her husband for being supportive saying he attends medical appointments whenever requested.
Her husband, Kebby Sinkala, says because of the situation the couple is faced with, even the relationships with family, friends have become strained.
“This problem is too much on us, the joy we enjoyed in the first six years of this marriage is no longer there. And the biggest challenge is that even when we attend family events, we are always asked when we will conceive.
“We get tired of people asking how the process is going, or offering suggestions on how to conceive. This is so unfair but that is how the Africans see marriage. It’s about bearing children,” Mr Sinkala says.
As a result of this challenge, Mr Sinkala says the couple has learnt a lot on how to maintain privacy in their marriage.
“We have been taught a lesson. Deciding how much information to share with family and friends and when to share it is what we do now,” he says.
He says this situation has brought them closer because even when the couple agree to seek any medical or spiritual intervention, they go together.
Today, there are a lot of women suffering these forms of dehumanisation due to their inability to conceive, and in most cases, the fault is usually laid on their shoulders, without the slightest knowledge that the men could be the cause of the problems.
A renowned Gynecologist and Obstetrician Swebby Macha says struggling to get pregnant can be a serious blow to the self-esteem of both women and men.
Dr Macha says several surveys reveal that women with infertility challenges feel flawed, while men, too, feel inadequate.
“Infertility also has a big impact on a couple’s relationship. Many couples find themselves trying to hide their feelings from their partner. Of course, while the older you are, the more your egg quality declines, the harder it is to conceive and the higher the rate of miscarriage, her age is not the most significant of her problems,” Dr Macha says.
Disbelief is a common issue among couples with infertility challenges.
Dr Macha says majority of people with infertility issues never imagined that they would experience it.
“For many couples prior to trying to conceive, it never occurred to them that they may have trouble getting pregnant when they wanted to. Many couples say that they may have waited too long to try to become pregnant. Most couples do not want to try IVF, I can safely say that , now we just enhance the ovaries and sperms of the affected couples, and that’s it,” Dr Macha says.
Dr Macha says many women and men understand the link between a woman’s age and fertility but they often do not fully understand how soon a woman’s fertility begins to decline significantly.
Statistics by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that more than 180 million couples (one in every four couples) in developing countries suffer from primary or secondary infertility.
WHO says infertility in Africa is caused by various infections in over 85 percent of women compared to 33 percent worldwide which emphasizes the importance of prevention programmes in Africa.
Furthermore WHO statistics show that a healthy 30-year-old woman has about a 20 percent chance per month of getting pregnant, but by age 40, her chance is only about five percent per month.
Infertility in developing countries like Zambia is an under-studied concern in sexual and reproductive health, yet its impact can be staggering.
An inability to conceive or bear children can result in being socially disliked or divorced.
While men and women are equally likely to be infertile, in Zambia and Africa as a whole, women are often blamed and infertility has been associated with intimate partner violence. PUBLISHED IN THE ZAMBIA DAILY MAIL ON JULY 23, 2017. LINK: https://www.daily-mail.co.zm/dealing-with-infertility-ivf-babies/