Ep.147: Emotional healing after IVF, with Shiloh IVF Ministry
Caitlin:
Welcome to the Woven Well Podcast. I'm your host, Caitlin Estes. I'm a certified fertility care practitioner with a master of divinity degree. Each episode will cover a topic that helps educate and empower you and your fertility while honoring the deep connection your fertility has with your faith. Let's get started.
Caitlin:
Welcome back to the Woven Well podcast. If you've ever struggled to conceive, then you know it can leave you feeling all sorts of things lost, overwhelmed, powerless. The desire for children is so strong, and yet there are rarely good answers, or at least it feels that way. Like unexplained infertility, it seems to be at an all time high. And when you're faced with this terrifyingly vague diagnosis, couples are just told, try IVF, but for many IVF isn't much better. You know, it comes with its own challenges, pains, risks, disappointments. It can be absolutely brutal. And there are very real concerns physically, emotionally, spiritually, to consider in the process. So as a certified fertility care practitioner, I get the opportunity to work with many of these couples who tried IVF and then came looking for alternatives instead. And it's always a joy to celebrate a natural pregnancy with a couple who were told that IVF was their only option.
Caitlin:
But the entire process of IVF leaves a mark. It's exhausting emotionally, mentally, physically, and women and couples who went through the experience, they deserve to have support afterwards to help them heal. So today I've invited Katie, a member of the team at Shiloh IVF Ministry to share a bit of her story and some hope for healing after IVF. Katie's been married for 20 years and she struggled with infertility the entire time. She has three living children and 10 lost in the process of IVF. She can share from personal experience what it's like to walk this journey and find hope on the other side. Katie, welcome to the show.
Katie:
Thank you so much for having me.
Caitlin:
I so appreciate your willingness to talk about this because I know it's tender and personal, and yet you're willing to open yourself up and share a little bit of your story. And I know it's going to mean a lot to those listening who have walked a similar journey. So why don't you share how you got involved in Shiloh IVF Ministry? Maybe what drew you to this work?
Katie:
Sure. So as you mentioned, my husband and I have experienced infertility during the duration of our marriage. So we knew we wanted to adopt and we did adopt our oldest daughter. When we went to adopt, again, that process didn't work quite as smoothly and as we were figuring out our infertility, IVF was really what was presented to us as our most likely chance of success. So we had some concerns with IVF, but we kind of pushed those to the background. We did have, so we, our two younger daughters are conceived through IVF. We had a total of 12 embryos that were harvested through a fresh cycle. So we had multiple frozen cycles after that in as well as miscarriages. And so we had, I guess, total of 10 frozen embryos that died in the process of IVF. Four most recently were in the freezer for several years.
Katie:
And my husband and I were doing something that married couples routinely do, which is kind of a budget review. And as we were doing that budget review, we saw this monthly cost for cryo preservation. And so it was really something completely normal that got us thinking about the lives that we had in the freezer and what are we going to do with these children. And we started down the embryo donation process. Then I kind of thought to myself, wow, we adopted our oldest. I never thought that I'd be creating an adoption plan for my own biological children. And so as we continued thinking about the options, we weren't going to donate to science, we weren't going to destroy them. We weren't really ready for our biological children to come back to us one day saying, Hey, why didn't you want to parent us? So we kind of thought, you know, God gave us these children even through this process that we really don't want to do again, because our faith has now gotten us to a point where we see the flaws in it.
Katie:
So we did try to save our last four embryos, ready to have our large family. And, we miscarried with two of them and two of them did not survive the thawing process. So after that I kind of like, we have experience with adoption, miscarriage, and IVF, in our infertility, how can we share this? And so I was looking to write about our experience, talk with people about our experience of IVF, because what I felt like I saw in the church is people saying you can't use IVF, but they weren't trying to use, I, they didn't either have infertility experience, they didn't have experience with IVF. And I have experience and can say from the other side, it's great. I have two children, you know, that are living from IVF. It's terrible that I have 10 that had to die in that process.
Katie:
And so, in sharing or trying to figure out, I was connected, I had reached out to the Fruitful Hollow, which is an infertility resource for folks. And they connected me with their theological editor at the time who was working on this process. She and the other lady that we work with had both started the research and figuring out the nuts and bolts of things. And I was able to join in as the IVF-experienced co-founder. So that's how I got involved in Shiloh. And I think it was the divine intervention as far as perfect fit.
Caitlin:
Yeah. Because it means so much to have someone who has walked through it, your explanation of the fact that there are so many people who say no to IVF, but they don't understand the heartache, they don't understand the journey, the medical side of things where they're trying to conceive, they're trying to get answers. So we can't just simply say, oh, don't do IVF without meeting the needs of the couples who are walking that journey or feel like are trying to discern if they should walk that journey or not. Now, from your story alone, we can already see a lot of pain points coming out. There's so many different things, but what would you say are some of the deepest pain points that come up a lot in this IVF ministry?
Katie:
So I think from the couples that we have either interviewed or work with, the biggest pain point is figuring out one post IVF figuring out what to do with the remaining cryopreserved embryonic children. You know, because the options just aren't great. You know, they, they are what they are. And so people really, you know, I think there's a point where you can kind of forget about them to some extent, but that cryo-preservation bill is always there and it is what is reminding people that they have children that are out there. So that's a big pain point. The idea, you know, we've had a couple people that have been trying to figure out what they're going to do because either one spouse has died. And so now they're like, what do I do with these? You know, can I transfer them for conception or what do I need to do? And then dealing with familial problems, you know, where there may be somebody used a donor, donor eggs and they haven't told their child that they were conceived using a donor either embryos or eggs or sperm. So navigating those discussions and how they're going to tell their children or not tell their children or what to do with that, those are kind of the pain points that we've seen most frequently.
Caitlin:
Those are so real. We focus so much on trying to get to a healthy, successful pregnancy that we don't always think about the other side of it and the struggles and difficulties that are found after even successful IVF cycles, you know, even when you do have a child through IVF, there are still things about it that can be deeply painful. And so I so appreciate your acknowledging those things and walking alongside women through that process. And I know that's what Shiloh IVF Ministry wants to do is accompany women through that healing after the IVF process. And that can look different for every single woman, every single couple. But I'm sure that God is present and providing in each one of those situations. Would you like to share a little bit about how you see God being present?
Katie:
Sure. I think when we have accompanied men, women, couples through their healing journey, you can just see a weight having been lifted. You know, it's something that I think for a long time people just don't even acknowledge that it's there and then there it takes, it's a journey with God to even have your eyes opened. And so I think really seeing that weight lifted or hearing it lifted out of their words and, you know, demeanor is really incredible. You can see that God is doing things through them even as we, you know, even as we speak with people and pray with them. It is just uplifting and healing comes from, especially just talking with somebody, sharing your story. because so many people just don't know how to share with people. And so having people who are willing to love them and accompany them and who have experienced it in some way is really been neat to see.
Caitlin:
Yeah. Well, and you mentioned that sometimes it's difficult to even talk about or before that to realize that it's something that they need to talk about. And I think about the trauma that's involved in the IVF process, like there is so much involved. And like I mentioned earlier, I've worked with several clients who went through IVF and whether they did successfully conceive and have a child through IVF or did not, they never want to go through it again, because it was so damaging to them physically or mentally or emotionally, you know, any of those categories. And so I think about the trauma involved and how when you go through a traumatic experience, yeah, you don't really want to have to talk about it. You don't want to have to think about it. And sometimes it's hard to acknowledge that it was actually traumatic, especially when you are raising children now and you're so grateful for those children. And so it's really hard to balance the blessing of the children with the trauma of the process. And so just acknowledging that and validating that I can imagine would be a very important part of the process. And there are lots of things that you all want to do through Shiloh IVF Ministry to support women and couples as they heal after IVF, whatever that looks like. So would you share some examples of what that looks like or what kind of support you all want to offer?
Katie:
Sure. So on our website, shilohivf.com, we have a place where people can share testimonies about IVF. We also have an honoring page where men, women, and couples can add an, you know, honoring memento for their embryonic children, regardless of what phase of life they are in. We also have mentors that are ready to walk with and accompany people on their journey to healing. So it's a one-on-one mentorship of listening, asking questions, just really figuring out to help people heal and discern next steps. Because a lot of people do still have frozen embryos that they don't know what to do with because the options. Just don't look great and they don't. So figuring out what next step they're going to take, we can, we offer discernment. We have a bunch of education materials about what those can be. We hope to eventually offer in-person retreats for people and offer healing. So that's kind of where we are now. We have developed a reconciliation guide for people that a couple of our clients have used. So that's where we are right now with what we're offering.
Caitlin:
Yeah, and I think it's important to emphasize the kind of discernment support that you all are offering because there are couples in very real challenging situations of not knowing what to do with remaining frozen embryos. And like you said, you have lots of options with education. So it's not a, oh, if you go work with Shiloh IVF ministry, then they're going to tell you to do this one thing with your embryos. You all are educating couples and walking along with them as they make their own decisions. And everything I've heard from speaking with you and speaking with some of the other founders, it is a very grace-filled process. There's none of this. Oh, well I know better than you and so I'm going to teach you how to do this. No, it's, we are all walking this together. We are all broken people. We've all been hurt and you've walked this, you know, Katie, you've had this experience, you know the pain involved in it. And so you can walk alongside someone else as they're making these decisions from a place of support and encouragement and prayer. And that could mean the world to couples walking through this.
Katie:
That's certainly what we hope.
Caitlin:
Absolutely. What do you wish that all couples considering IVF could know
Katie:
The suffering is okay. You know, I don't, our world is so wanting to fix things right away that it's actually okay. And God can use the suffering of infertility for amazing things. So that's number one. The other thing is there were a lot of red flags that jumped out at me as I went through the IVF process and we just kind of pushed them to the side. But don't push them to the side. Feel them. Yeah. And experience, you know, think about them and really consider it. You know, I thought the embryos look like a droplet of water under the microscope, so it just said they can't be life. because it doesn't look like life in there to me, but oh my gosh, was it, you know, and that was part of the realization that we came to as like, these are in fact children and children don't belong in the freezer. And that's not a place, that's not an end point for their life, you know, and I think IVF uses, they make more embryos than they will use in the process. And because you have to go back from multiple cycles generally for it to be successful, so you frequently end up with excess that aren't used. And then what do you do with those?
Caitlin:
We're afraid to listen to the red flags, afraid of what it would mean if IVF wasn't an option when you're told IVF is your only option. But there is hope out there, there are are alternatives out there. And if you see red flags, if you don't have a peace in your spirit about it, go to God with it. God will provide for you. God will give you avenues to receive your heart's desire and your heart's desire is going to be union with God. So it may look like bearing biological children. It may look like adopting. It may look like spiritual motherhood and investing in your community. But God will not leave you desolate. God will not leave you alone. Thank you so much for sharing your story and a little bit about this new ministry with us, Katie.
Katie:
You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Caitlin.
Caitlin:
Listeners, I hope you walk away with a renewed hope for restoration and healing, no matter your journey. We believe wholeheartedly that women deserve answers to their fertility questions, especially those who are told that they have unexplained infertility. I've got to tell you, I don't think that really exists. So I'm going to link several episodes in the show notes that talk about unexplained infertility and the IVF alternatives that are available. And if you have any questions for us, reach out through the link in the show notes or at wovenfertility.com. We'll also be sure to have the link to Shiloh IVF Ministry if you'd like to work with them to heal after your IVF process. As always, thanks so much for listening as we continue to explore together what it means to be woven well.