For thousands of couples in India, the dream to have a baby remains that way – a dream. With rising infertility rates, the number of couples who have difficulty conceiving is increasing every day. And while cause for infertility may be attributed to a number of reasons, the biggest affliction that stops these couples from having a chance at parenthood is probably silence.
Our society tends to look at infertility through lenses that end up pitying, or worse, shaming those who suffer from infertility. This, naturally, encourages those who have a problem to keep it to themselves, even if there is a possibility for a solution.
Fertile Conversations, an initiative by the Times of India in association with Nova IVF Fertility, attempts to break this silence. To take a leaf from self-help literature, the first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge it.
With panel discussions with fertility experts, public seminars across cities and many other initiatives to get people talking about, Fertile Conversations by TOI aims to spread awareness about infertility and offers hope and a platform for couples to get their questions about infertility answered by domain experts. The initiative opens up channels of communication for discussions about infertility and possible solutions. In fact, the Fertile conversation site (www.Fertileconversations.in) provides opportunities for anyone to ask questions to experts as well as a fertility quiz where people can see how their lifestyle choices could influence their fertility. Almost 1500 people have already taken the test so far.
Fertile Conversations is an initiative that is the need of the hour and will surely kick start conversations that will help the transformation to a mindset where infertility is treated as a medical issue, and not a personal failure.