When Meredith finally decides she’s ready to get pregnant, she can’t. She suffers a miscarriage, then struggles to conceive again. Ultimately, she turns to fertility clinics and drugs in the hopes that they will soothe her supposedly “hostile uterus.”
Just like it challenged abortion myths, Grey’s Anatomy does a great job of busting some infertility myths too. Meredith hilariously frets that she can’t conceive for a number of reasons, from her college-era tequila binges, to scary-sounding conditions she’s encountered in her medical practice.
But the show ultimately attributes her infertility to chance. That’s unique. Other media — and real-life people, in their casual conversations — subtly blame women for being unable to conceive. The Handmaid’s Tale (both the book and TV show) call this misperception out explicitly. In their dystopic totalitarian society, male infertility is impossible in the popular mind; though men may be biologically infertile, women are always the ones at fault for “failing” to conceive.
On the other hand, Grey’s Anatomy makes a point of blaming the randomness of the universe, not Meredith. Meredith cleverly calls out the unfairness of putting all the attention on women, when in reality, it takes two. She asks Derek how he’d feel if the doctor called his penis “angry or snide,” like she called Meredith’s uterus “hostile." Finally, the couple decides to put their infertility woes to rest, and they find joy in adopting their baby girl, Zola.
For all its positive representations of infertility, though, Grey’s Anatomy just couldn’t leave Meredith and Derek as adoptive parents. Shortly after they bring Zola home, Meredith unexpectedly conceives. It’s like the show is saying: if you wait long enough, you too can overcome your infertility!
This is a running theme in a lot of media. Infertility isn’t as taboo as it once was, and we see many shows, novels, and films trying to capture the grief of couples who want to have children, but can’t. But what remains rare are representations of women who stay infertile, forever. Everyone wants that happy ending, where the impossible happens. Take the film The Odd Life of Timothy Green. A couple who’ve just exhausted their fertility treatment options get to be “parents” when a 10-year-old boy magically emerges out of their garden, instantly knowing to call them Mom and Dad. This couple’s pain is eased only with a literally magical solution to the “problem” of their infertility. In this film and countless others, we don’t see how couples grapple with and move past infertility; we only see them get the child they wanted all along.
Even more serious films don’t leave us with couples yearning for parenthood. Psychological thriller When the Bough Breaks highlights how traumatizing infertility was for Laura and John: “I tried for so long to get pregnant,” Laura says. “I had three miscarriages. It put the two of us through hell. You start to hate your own body.” The couple decides to hire a surrogate, Ana, and Laura makes it her mission to make that baby hers — even when Ana extorts more money from them, seduces John, threatens to kill the baby, and then runs away with it. What’s thrilling (and bizarre) about this film is that we never question Laura and John’s motives. Overcoming infertility and getting the child they so desperately crave seem like perfectly viable reasons to make death threats and to instruct your husband to cheat on you.
We see this same absence of indefinitely infertile women in Jane the Virgin. Rafael and Petra’s marriage began crumbling when Petra suffered miscarriage after miscarriage. Again though, her infertility “problem” is miraculously solved as soon as she artificially inseminates herself. Nine months later, Petra gives birth to perfect twins.
And we see it again in Peaky Blinders. While Grace and her husband seek treatment to help them conceive, she miraculously gets pregnant with Tommy’s child. It’s as though she was infertile because she was with the wrong man.
Viewers don’t want to watch their favourite characters suffer. That’s why plotlines involving infertility so often end with astonishing conceptions, adoptions, or surrogacy arrangements. Yet for many couples, permanent infertility is their reality. There are no little boys magically sprouting from the ground to fulfill their desire for children. How does it make these couples feel, to only see their struggle shown with an unrealistic fairy-tale ending? Perhaps in the near future, we’ll see plotlines where infertile couples can work through their grief and find happiness in ways other than becoming parents. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet.
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