The Infertile Anthropologist
by Lindsay Bell
Embryo Image
The drawer of my nightstand is stuffed with greyscale images of human embryos. I don’t often open the drawer. When I do, I’m startled by them. Even though they have been there for over five years, I’m prone to pushing memories of multiple failed rounds of InVitro Fertilization (IVF) aside. I acquired each image from a nurse as I lay on my back with my feet in stirrups. Moments later an embryologist would appear with what looked like a drinking straw. I had to trust that the pictured embryo was inside. The doctor took the straw and put it to the catheter, which delivered the embryo to my uterus. I held the image in my hand, slightly confused as to what to do with it or where to look while the doctor performed the quick procedure. I stared at each image while I rested for the requisite ten minutes afterward, reminding myself that embryos can’t fall out when you stand up.
I dutifully took each image home and hung it on the refrigerator. I would return to the clinic eleven days later to see if the embryo transfer was successful. Most embryos did not become fetuses. Instead, they implanted themselves into the walls of my uterus only to grow for a week or so before their development would stop. Once the embryos met their fate, I moved their images upstairs into my nightstand drawer. The drawer was becoming crowded. The reproductive endocrinologist called it recurrent pregnancy loss. He described my insides as an inhospitable environment. I debated throwing the images out but found I was unable to.
In North America, one in six heterosexual couples experience fertility challenges. This number has doubled since the 1980s. While not alone, the experience of infertility was initially very lonely. I craved a community that could understand. As my quest to reproduce dragged on, I found comfort in the experiences of my friends who had been through the extended cycle of grief and hope that is IVF. I began to document my experiences on social media and found the anglophone online world was full of self-described “IVF warriors.” I pored over other Instagram accounts of people with similar stories to mine, hoping to find a clue as to how to stay pregnant.
As my engagement with the community grew, I found I could not separate my infertility from my training as an anthropologist. The task of the anthropologist is often summarized as “making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” As I scrolled through people’s Instagram pages, the central role of embryo images to people’s stories and experiences of trying to conceive struck me as particularly ripe for anthropological analysis.
For many in the online community, embryo images help to narrate the arc of IVF experiences in fairly common ways. It begins with the ever-optimistic picture of the embryo and its host body in the fertility clinic. The embryo recipient usually holds the printout while wearing a hair net, pulling down their mask to show a smile. Next there is often a picture of the embryo image beside a large box of McDonald’s french fries. There is some superstition that the sodium helps reduce the possibility of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and assists with implantation. From here, the story can go two ways. The embryo image might appear next to a positive pregnancy test surrounded by hundreds of needles arranged as the sun’s rays—a testament to the storm endured.
In the case of a negative pregnancy test or miscarriage, the embryo image takes the other visual direction. It becomes an object of mourning. Sometimes the caption speaks directly to the embryo, expressing love for it or offering an apology for not providing it with the right environment to thrive. Other times the image is simply held beside the mourner’s face, red and stained with tears. For both groups, a watercolor painting of the embryo might be commissioned to either celebrate a live birth, or to mark a loss.
The visual culture of embryo images for those of us who have gone through IVF can easily be taken for granted. The pull I feel when I open my nightstand drawer tells me it isn’t so straightforward. Why can’t I throw the pictures out? They are just pictures after all. I now have two IVF “successes.” I am on the other side of the rainbow. In the strange and unnamable mix of feelings that lurk in the corners of my IVF memories is the unresolved tension around what embryos are and what they might be. I am of the political persuasion that embryos need not be accorded the rights of persons, yet these images were, to me, the potential of a person. How do you grieve potentiality without ascribing personhood to this particular mix of genetic material?
Instead of considering this issue alone, I decided to do what any anthropologist might do—ask those living through similar conditions about their experience. I leveraged my online friendships to begin to study IVF through the lens of the embryo image. I am in the process of talking to people who have undergone IVF about their images, what they mean to them and what they do with them. From their stories, I am trying to understand the social impact and cultural meanings of embryo imaging technologies and contemporary forms of family making. Technologies that allow us to see parts of the reproductive process often change how we view and understand the process itself. The technology to visualize embryos and fetuses is not intrinsically controversial but nevertheless is embroiled in debates over acceptable forms of scientific research, definitions of personhood, and what constitutes life.
I conceived of this project before Roe vs Wade was overturned. While none of the current or proposed state legislation to ban abortion impacts frozen embryos, there is some fear that definitions of life beginning at fertilization could include those eggs fertilized outside of bodies. The US anti-abortion movement has a history of using IVF to amplify its goals. Most of my friends-turned-research-participants are much like me—white, upper middle class, and all are pro-choice. While I don’t initiate political conversations, their feelings about how embryo images make pregnancy “feel real” (whether the pregnancy persists to term or not) always seem to be tempered by an awareness that the strong sense of attachment to “what could have been” is precisely the logic anti-abortion groups depend on.
My IVF friends struggle to find the right words to talk about the incredible experience of seeing the embryo that became their hard-won child while staying faithful to their political values. In our conversations, we try and work through unsettled feelings, but they are stubborn and resist any easy labels we might try and ascribe to them. I am grateful to have found those willing to navigate this space with me. Our IVF stories are still unfolding.
Lindsay A. Bell is an assistant professor of anthropology at Western University, Canada. She is the author of Under Pressure: Diamond Mining and Everyday Life in a Northern Town. You can find her musings on infertility and the arctic on Instagram @thefrozenyogi.