Does Infertility Cause Emotional Tension, or Does Emotional Tension Cause Infertility?

There are many couples whose marriages are completely destroyed by the pressures and resentments caused by their infertility. The wife is often meticulously checking her ovulation times by observing her cervical mucus, taking her basal body temperature, or using expensive drugstore kits to check her urine every day to see if the dipstick turns blue (indicating she’s going to ovulate soon). The couple will often put off intercourse for several weeks or more, waiting for the moment when the woman’s urine ovulation test turns positive. But at the right time, the husband or wife may be out of town. A conflict then ensues because he can’t fly back home just because she’s ready to ovulate, or because she can’t fly to where he has business meetings. They finally agree on where to meet, not for the purpose of having a joyous reunion, but so he can inseminate her at the right moment. The emotional tension induced by trying to time intercourse precisely to the moment of ovulation often delays ovulation anyway, and their efforts are therefore of little use.

Carefully observed follow-up studies of families with infertility from both Europe and the United States compared to control groups of families with naturally conceived children have objectively demonstrated that parents of children conceived by ’VP express greater warmth toward their child, are more emotionally involved with their child, interact more successfully with their child, and report less stress associated with parenting than couples who have conceived the child naturally. Thus, there seems to be no objective evidence for the hurtful myth that infertile couples are infertile because they have psychological problems. Some argue that, in an evolutionary sense, emotional dysfunction would have negative effects on a child, and that is why it is a cause for infertility: However, evidence that children conceived with IVF exhibit greater psychological health than the population norm favors the opposite view, that infertility is not caused by an emotional condition, but that the emotional tension of infertile couples is caused by the infertility itself.

Nonetheless, evidence is accumulating to suggest that couples undergoing assisted reproductive technology (ART) in order to solve their infertility problem are likely to have better results if they are emotionally calm and capable of dealing with the extreme stress this can place upon them. I will get into the details of those observations later in the chapter, but at the outset I want to emphasize that it is bad medicine to just tell these couples to relax. Usually, such an approach is self-delusional, and the anguish persists even though it may be suppressed and unadmitted.

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