What I like about what Emma Barnett said about IVF, recently
I’ve just re-listened to Emma Barnett’s conversation with Jamie Laing on the Great Company podcast – mainly because she’s been saying lots of interesting stuff about menopause (more my area, these days), too. I remembered that there was a lot of ‘unpopular opinion’ in their chat, which the IVF community – and the infertility ‘parent company’ (including me, as was) – might find helpful, and validating, to see distilled.
Emma is an award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster, but she is also someone who has lived through seven rounds of IVF to have her two children, alongside endometriosis and, more recently, given powerful platforms to conversations around perimenopause and HRT.
What stood out to me on my re-listen wasn’t the detail of IVF, but the clarity with which she describes the social and lived reality of it, particularly the uglier parts that are often softened, or left out altogether.
Here’s what I like about what Emma is saying – the points I would have found very helpful to read, almost a decade ago when miscarriages, fertility grief and friendship breakdowns were my day to day reality.
Being out of control, physically
Emma opens with how she experiences intimidation and discomfort not in professional spaces, despite interviewing prime ministers and navigating high-pressure journalism, but in relation to her own body.
“I’m intimidated by my body […] things where I’m out of control, physically.”
IVF, fertility treatment and, increasingly, conversations around menopause all seem to orbit a central truth: so much of it is about learning to tolerate a lack of control. You can follow every instruction perfectly, attend every scan, take every medication at the right time, and still not be able to influence the outcome in the way you might expect. That is a uniquely disorientating experience, particularly for decisive people, who are used to being able to problem-solve their way through life.
Emma doesn’t try to make that feeling more palatable than it is. It is okay to find it uncomfortable. It is okay to find it overwhelming. Learning how to sit alongside that discomfort without letting it completely take over everything else – that’s the challenge.
It becomes your life
Anyone who has been through fertility treatment will recognise the shift, where clinic admin becomes more than a set of appointments to run alongside your life. If you’re having IVF, it slowly starts to become the structure of it. Your calendar begins to revolve around scans and blood tests, your conversations start to laser focus on follicle counts and embryo updates, and your mental energy is constantly pulled towards waiting for the next stage, the next result, the next decision point.
“I think I was intimidated by how much it could be my life.”
This is about identity. Fertility treatment can narrow your sense of time and space until it feels like everything is being funnelled through a single process. Even when life is still happening around it, it can feel as though it is happening slightly at the edges.
Going again is really hard
One of the most emotionally charged parts of the conversation is when Emma talks about the IVF cycle that ultimately led to her second child.
She describes nearly not doing that final round after having a miscarriage, reaching a point where she felt completely done with the process.
“The audacity of wanting a second child haunted us – you know – we should just be happy with what we’ve got.”
This is something that often goes unspoken – particularly around secondary infertility. There is a complexity to wanting to try again when you already have a child, a layer of guilt that can sit alongside grief, exhaustion and hope all at once.
You go into a hole, and you get a new squad
Argh. This one hits because I really, really felt so much of it (and guilty for doing so). Emma talks about how, in the midst of something so consuming, there is often a quiet reshuffling of emotional support.
“For certain scenarios, you get a new squad.”
She explains that while longstanding friendships remain important, there are some experiences that create their own kind of shorthand between people. Emma describes having what she calls an “IVF fairy”, someone she could message at any time, day or night, who understood exactly what she meant without explanation. She has since become that person for others.
It’s not replacement or rejection exactly (although she does acknowledge that some people will feel it that way), but a kind of emotional specificity. Certain experiences require a different kind of support system, one that understands the immediacy and intensity of what you are going through.
Being happy for others is really, really complicated
Emma also talks very openly about the emotional difficulty of seeing other people’s pregnancies when you are struggling yourself. She doesn’t frame it as jealousy in a simplistic sense, but as something much more complex and painful.
“When your friends are having children and you can’t – it has a particularly difficult flavour to it. Because you want to be happy for your friends.”
This is one of the hardest parts of fertility struggles to articulate publicly, because it can feel very uncomfortable, and hurtful. You love your friends and want to share in their joy, celebrate with them – but you can’t, not right now. And that is okay. Trust me, that is absolutely okay.
Sometimes it doesn’t work
Because yes – IVF is often only spoken about when it is successful – years of trying and resilience, yes, but ultimately, it worked. Emma has been very vocal about changing that narrative, particularly in her writing and in interviews.
“I am done with people only writing about IVF when it works.”
She describes the reality more bluntly elsewhere in her work, that you can go through the entire process – again and again – and leave with nothing. That honesty matters, because it makes space for the full spectrum of outcomes, not just the ones that end in a baby.
Her journalism on this, including her Times article about her own experience, is refreshing. IVF is not a guaranteed pathway, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to the people going through it.
Gratitude is a rod to beat the IVF community with
Finally, that pressure to feel grateful once treatment has worked.
Emma is very clear that while she is grateful for her children, she resists the idea that gratitude has to be ‘performed’ in any way.
“I wasn’t going to have that thing of, ‘be grateful for them every single day’, ‘be grateful for the experience’ – of course I am.”
Parenthood after IVF can carry an additional layer of emotional expectation, where people feel they should constantly affirm how lucky they are.
Emma also points out something important about judgement, particularly online:
“For the people who shit on you – not all of them – it’s often about them.”
It’s a reminder that commentary around fertility, IVF, illness and motherhood often reveals more about the person speaking than the person being spoken about. I’ll definitely have this in mind, when I’m raging at the comments section next time.
On your reading list:
Rage too, you? Channel it here:
- “I’m sick of women not being listened to”: Naga Munchetty on period pain, diagnosis and talking to your GP
- Cramping after IVF transfer? Don’t panic – here’s what to do
- These influencers with endometriosis are our ultimate support follows
- Emma Barnett: We can’t ignore this disease that leaves one in 10 women like me in agony
- Emma Barnett: My IVF Journey & Why I Felt Like I’d Failed at Fertility
Great Company with Jamie Laing - Emma Barnett: five rounds of iVF, one miscarriage and no baby (Emma’s 2022 article for The Times)
Header image credit: Karen Robinson/The Observer
