Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is the Presenting Sponsor of the AFA Website
The American Fertility Association Blog
Tyra Update - Part Deux
January 23, 2008 - Wednesday
Posted by admin
To our extraordinary members:
We wanted to share our experience of you in the wake of our response to the calls, emails and blog entries we received about the taping of the Tyra Banks Show segment on infertility. The whole episode obviously struck a chord deep within this community. The blizzard of cyber-notes sent to us about our stance regarding the show’s alleged mishandling of the issue has been overwhelming. Thank you!
Thank you for your letters, both affirming and critical of our actions. Because what’s most important in all this is that you’ve spoken up, engaged with us and your peers about topics as sensitive and critical as fertility, infertility, assisted reproductive technologies, family-building, individual choice and public perception.
What can we say? You are remarkable.
Just to update you: Like you, we’re awaiting the airing of the show. We do believe in their right to produce whatever they want. We also believe in our right to respond. Now, everything we know comes from people who’ve told us what they witnessed at the toping. The reports were infuriating. So in the interest of getting a clear picture, we phoned the producers, hoping to hear their perspective. We’re still waiting for a return call.
Now, perhaps, as two of you have written, we jumped the gun with our open letter of protest to the show’s senior producer. If we did—great! Nothing would make us happier than to be mistaken about the Tyra Banks Show. We’d gleefully offer an apology. All we’re after is fair and intelligent treatment by the media. There’s no question but that we’ll fight for that and fight hard. (We’ll keep you posted as the situation unfolds.)
By the sheer volume of your correspondence to The AFA, it’s clear that you want the same. Your activism and input are essential to keeping the media, politicians and regulators on the ball and honest. So we want to take this unique opportunity to urge you to continue this dialog with and through The AFA. It’s so important that we communicate among ourselves, a kind of de facto think tank. To that end we’ll be publishing as many of your notes as we can fit in the next issue of Connections and putting all of them up--pro and con--on our blog.
It’s your voices, your opinions, ideas, experiences and observations that help The AFA shape its perspectives, educational initiatives and policy agenda on everything from compromised fertility, access to health care, treatment affordability and insurance to sexual and reproductive health and the pursuit of family-building. It’s your insights that make the difference.
Yes we are an educational organization, full of top-notch information free to everyone. But The AFA is also an energetic advocate for enlightened policies to guarantee the basic human right to have family. That means that we not only work on infertility and its ripple effects, we also tackle social, legal and political issues through the lens of fertility preservation and prevention. That includes, but certainly isn’t limited to, access to scientifically based sex education, an environment free of fertility-damaging toxins and efforts to promote all forms of family-building. Our goal is to elevate our issues into the mainstream national discussion about reproductive health and rights. Our goal is to be in the room when policy is made, not merely to respond after the fact.
So tune in and jack in. Ask questions. Send your personal stories for The AFA blog or our publications. Share your take on the medical, social, political aspects of infertility, fertility, third-party reproduction, adoption, foster care. After all, it’s about creating a family. It’s what you’re about. It’s what we’re about. We’re in it together. Let’s keep the connections open.
With warm regards,
The AFA Staff
Categories
Fertility •
Infertility •
Reproductive Technologies
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Trampling on Trust
January 21, 2008 - Monday
Posted by admin
As many of you know, The AFA makes every effort to assist the media when reports, stories and programs deal with infertility, reproductive difficulties, fertility preservation and protection. We were approached by the Tyra Banks show senior producer who pitched one segment about women who pursue ART despite repeated let-downs and perhaps impossible odds. We sent a notice to you asking if you’d be interested in participating in that show. Since then, reports have flowed back to us --it appears the taping revealed another agenda entirely. If that’s the case, we are furious on your behalf and ours. There is no excuse for a duplicitious solicitation. Below is the open letter we’ve sent to the Trya Banks senior producer and the first wave of responses from you. The emails are flowing in. As we get permission we’ll post more as they come in. Mind you, this blog is just the beginning of the long and robust dialog we at The AFA hope to continue with you about the issues that spark your interest and ignite the vital communications we all need. So let’s keep talking.
Ms. Radecki,
The American Fertility Association is writing in response to the numerous calls, emails and blog links we’ve received about the Tyra Banks Show you’ve produced about “infertility.”
We gladly assisted you in your effort to recruit people who’ve stuck with Assisted Reproduction despite long-shot odds and the painful difficulties associated with compromised fertility for an installment of your show. Your detailed query asked for contact with women who could speak emotionally and articulately about their determination and their struggles (see below). It is your right to interview willing and informed participants as you see fit. Here we underscore informed. Your show is not a news show, but rather planned entertainment. Nowhere in that initial letter or in numerous subsequent conversations did you even hint that what you were intending was a set up for “spontaneous” interventions and the subsequent damaging conflagrations.
Let’s be clear. If you’d honestly put forth your mission, stating that the Tyra Banks Show was interested in emotional confrontations, people willing to defend to family, friends and the world their particular quest for biogenetic children, we’d have put out your solicitation to our membership just the same. We believe in the intelligent decision-making capacities of the people The American Fertility Association serves. However, it now appears you were running a bait-and-switch operation designed to exploit well-meaning and, apparently, the most vulnerable among this group of patients simply to re-create a by-now tired and trite TV rite of public humiliation. That is simply reprehensible.
It is unfortunate that the prism through which The Tyra Banks Show chose to view the delicate and complex subjects of reproductive difficulties and associated medical treatments yielded very little about those topics. Instead, we are told, the focus was on manufactured conflict and hysteria. You could just as well have targeted any other poorly understood condition or disease and produced the same segment.
We regret that we have exposed our membership to such tactics. Despite urging that you treat reproductive difficulties with sensitivity and thoughtfulness—even if that yielded tough grilling and a feisty give-and-take, you chose to tread the same histrionic ground that’s pretty well trampled by now.
The Staff of The American Fertility Association
Categories
Adoption •
Fertility •
Infertility
(14) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
The Fertility Race…..
December 18, 2007 - Tuesday
Posted by Pamela
I have done more media than anyone I know who is not famous has a right to do. Sometimes I do as many as three or four interviews a week. And I have been doing that for a very long time...and it is such a hit and miss experience...sometimes the reporter or editor nails it...and sometimes they just don’t.
Doing media is not glamorous...I have shown up at 5 am to do a morning news show and have been literally forgotten in the green room!! My entire family has dedicated full days to taping magazine news shows on infertility - that have never aired...or when they do air...eight hours of taping is three minutes of air time...But I do it, because working with the media is one of the best ways that I know of to educate the public, and influence health care policy in this country...and the good media that I do often out paces the pieces that I am disappointed in.
The other day I came across a piece of media that I think is one of the best pieces that I have ever participated in...it was called The Fertility Race.... and it was done with NPR and MSNBC.....
I remember that we spent three days with the reporters...the entire family....the kids were so young...and I was in an old weight class!!!
At the time, I was the either the President of RESOLVE NYC or the Executive Director....I don’t remember...for me the names of the organizations have changed...but the work...and what drives me and my staff has not. A few of us have been together as long as this piece is old!!!!
If you want a peek at how I live...even though the place has been updated a bit...it is still the same place...I still work from home..as does all of my staff...and the imperative is unchanged. At the time of this interview - we were working on passing the NY State Mandate...we did it.
So...I invite you to be voyeurs...peek into my living room...view “Pamela’s Photo Album” or listen to the audio tour of my home, that NPR called “The Shrine to Infertility”...the kids are almost grown now...I am now the Executive Director of The American Fertility Association...the cat, bird, and guinea pigs are no longer with us...but the rest...well...the rest has stayed surprisingly the same.
Until Tomorrow -
Pamela
Categories
Adoption •
Fertility •
Infertility
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
A Deeper Meaning…
December 16, 2007 - Sunday
Posted by Pamela
Sometimes when I write...I wonder about who is reading...and why? What brings them to this page?
This past Sunday morning, I popped onto the blog and there were 193 people on line reading! And that was early in the morning!! 193 people at 7 am on a Sunday morning, is a lot of people in one moment!
Suddenly..I felt this huge responsibility. I worried if they (you) were getting what you needed from me. Was I feeding your soul in some way? Was I entertaining you...giving your information...or making you think? Why were those readers jacking into my blog? What were they looking for?
The AFA is a diverse organization - addressing so many different issues...but at it’s core we are an organization that supports people that are trying to conceive.
And I remember that time in my life...like it was yesterday...even though it wasn’t. For me...trying to conceive a child was a time in my life that could be coined..a dark night of the soul.
It was a time in my life where everything felt out of control for me. It was not romantic and fun....it was a time sadness...of trial...of repeated loss every time I got my period...I was filled with feelings of frustration...my sense of self was ruptured..and I felt like a failure. This was a time in my life that was so upsetting, anxiety filled, and long lasting...that for me...it is not dramatic at all to call that time in my life.. a dark night of the soul.
I wonder if some of you are feeling that way right now...like you too are going through a dark night of soul...and I wonder how you are coping with those very dark and painful feelings. When we go through these times..it can make you question the very meaning of life.
And it is perfectly normal, when we go through these life trials, that our instinct is to move through these times as quickly as possible...but life has taught me that as difficult as it can feel..if we are looking for a deeper meaning..our character...and personal substance...if we allow ourselves simply to be in our dark night...that we may find that it holds important gifts for us. In fact, we may do our best work during these times in our lives. And these times may offer up to us precious moments of transformation...in our personal lives..in our work...in our spirit.
Most of us, experience many dark nights of the soul...life is full of contrast between the happy and the sad...the light and the dark...it is how we go through these cycles of life that can teach us and nurture us.
I have tried many different ways of coping...I have tried control...and pushing through to the other side..and I have tried surrendering to the moment and being still with the pain.
For me...it is out of the stillness...where true transformation has come. Sometimes it is through turning in..and doing less..and truly being with the pain where my biggest break throughs have come. Some people call it “sitting in the fire”...some people call it meditation.
A dark night may appear as a way of returning us to living our lives more fully in a way that we might not have imagined before...it can bring our lives down to the essentials...and can help us get a new start that can change the direction of our lives.
Recently, Adam Pertman, the Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, spoke at The AFA Kokopelli Ball...and he talked about the dark night of his own experience of infertility...and that he was grateful for it...because it brought him the children that he was meant to have through adoption. Children that he could not imagine his life without.
A dark night of the soul, can bring us many gifts if we allow ourselves simply to go through it. You don’t get to pick your dark nights yourself...they are given to you...and it’s your job to take a pail and shovel..and feel through the sand...for the precious bits that can change your life forever.
Come sit...I will dig with you.
Until Tomorrow -
Pamela
Categories
Adoption •
Infertility
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Beyond Sex Education: Teens Talk About Their Origins
December 11, 2007 - Tuesday
Posted by Pamela
One of the biggest problems I have as a Founder/Executive Director...is that I have been doing this work for most of my adult life...and sometimes even I forget what we have done in the past...and it is good to remember...and think about how we can be incorporating past ideas and programs into what we are doing now.
I have been looking through some of my older writings...past programs...and remembering...and boy oh boy did I shamelessly put my kids out there for “The Cause!” And my husband reminded me, the struggles that we had when we decided to let the kids do media on behalf of the fertility community. Kai was concerned that the kids would be tainted...that other kids would tease them. Was it fair for us to turn our kids into activists?
In the end...we decided that if we were frightened of our children being tainted in some unknown way by being known as IVF kids...then it was our job to let the world see these beautiful, articulate children that were indeed “Test Tube Babies”. We needed to put our family out here to change perceptions. And so we did.
In 2003, we put out this press release..and conducted a media tour with my oldest son Tyler as one of the spokespeople!!! And guess what I asked my poor teenage son to do? Read the headline!!! And the Press Release!!
Beyond Sex Education: Teens Talk About Their Origins
Teens born through Assisted Reproductive Technology speak about their perceptions of their conception
*New York, NY, April 25, 2003 *** In celebration of World Infertility Month, teenagers take sex education a step further and talk about how they feel about their high tech origins.
Tyler Madsen and Lily Johnson were conceived through Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and they’re not afraid to talk about how they were conceived.
Since Louise Brown made her debut in 1978 in England, it is estimated that 1,000,000 children have been born though ART, said Karen Hammond, Chair of The American Infertility Association. These children, many of them young adults now, are telling us they’re comfortable, confident and secure with who they are. The news is that children born through ART feel no different than other children.”
AIA spokes-teen, Tyler Madsen, is a freshman at LaGuardia High School in New York City focusing on drama. Tyler has spoken in many public forums about his conception, including a press conference in Lucerne Switzerland and last year at the U.S. launch of World Infertility Month (WIM) at the United Nations. Tyler was conceived through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) in 1988, using his mother=s eggs and father=s sperm.
“Some people may think that my conception makes me different or special from others,” said Tyler Madsen. “In fact, I’m like any other teenager with the same concerns, the same goals and the same dreams. I think all kids are special and unique. It doesn’t matter how they were conceived. That’s just a technicality.”
Lily Johnson is 13, an avid swimmer, and in 7th grade at Las Colinas Middle School in Camarillo CA. Over the years, Lily has done many interviews about her conception including two documentaries with her brother, Chase, who is 9. Lily was conceived through surrogacy, using artificial insemination and a surrogate’s egg and uterus.
“I was born through surrogacy and I think it is excellent because couples can have children, even if they can’t biologically,” said Lily Johnson. It doesn’t matter how children are created, as long as they ARE created.”
I think it’s important that children born through ART talk about it, so that people will realize that they are just like everyone else and its nothing to worry about or feel funny about,” said Fay Johnson, Lily’s mother. Hopefully with teen role models, other kids born through ART can feel comfortable.”
In order to help parents talk to their children about their conceptions, The AIA created fact sheets for guidance; “Out of the Dish: Talking to Children About Their IVF Origins” and “Talking with Children about Ovum Donation” are available on The AIA website at http://www.americaninfertility.org or by contacting The AIA toll free at 877-917-3777.”
So...yes...a lot has changed! We are no longer called The American Infertility Association....and WIM is now WorldFAM (http://www.WorldFAM.org) ....The Co-Chairs are now Stuart Miller and Patricia Mendell...and Tyler....well he is now at Parson’s School of Design where is he is majoring in Technology and Design...and by the way...he still helps out The AFA...he helped implement this new website....in fact Tyler designed this blog for his dear old mom. And yes...I am shamelessly proud of him.
To see a link to one of the interviews that resulted from these press tours...please click here!!!. It is very cute...and you get to see pictures of much younger Tyler and Spencer.
Until Tomorrow,
Pamela
Categories
Adoption •
Fertility •
Infertility •
IVF •
Reproductive Technologies •
World Fertility Awareness Month
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink