The only person I knew well that committed suicide was a man who felt shame and disappointment because he could not have children.

He and his wife had an expectation of having children, first naturally and then by the false hope of medical intervention. But medicine was never going to be able to assist him to be the father to the children of his wife. He did not invent the shame and disappointment he felt, nor did someone else force him to feel shame and disappointment. He felt shame because having children is our innate raw biological purpose: the perpetuation of our genes. He felt disappointment because we all had a childhood and can envisage the nature and nurture of a childhood we might create: the re-generation of our selves and the good things that might come of that.

To suggest that the shame and disappointment felt when one cannot have children is due to a patriarchal conspiracy to oppress women, and this is cynically promoted and exploited by fertility medics is absurd. It is offensive to the countless millions of both men and women who are trying to have children and have not been able. And it is a slap in the face of the thousands of scientists, engineers and medics who are finding practical ways to help rather than writing 500 words of trendy social sciences pap.

Perhaps it has just been a long day for me, but it seems this commentary is a bit all over without quite hitting the mark. There are indeed many ways that fertility clinics prey on women (and men). Self-blame is only a contributing factor for how that can occur. It is so not so much that these treatments make women feel they have failed by not being able to carry the child, it is that they obfuscate what technology can do and make the false promises (rooted in feminism, not patriarchy) that everything about our fertility can be simulated and controlled and can be put off endlessly until the time is just right for us. The statistics of successful pregnancy begin to hint at this. The reality is two fold: there is so much about pregnancy and fertility we still do not understand (heck we still only have theories for what actually triggers the cascade of labour!) and the fertility process bypasses key steps which the body has in place which probably have repercussions for viability. For example in each cycle a number of eggs are recruited before the body chooses the one for ovulation. It is unclear what makes that egg the best egg, but it certainly seems unlikely to be random. Egg retrieval harvests all of those eggs at once and hopes to get the viable one working in a petri dish. Even which ovary produces the egg is variable, and seems to have some relationship with fertility (I.e. as a women ages they tend to ovulate more from the left side which also for whatever reason tends to result in less pregnancies). In addition there are significant barriers which the female body (and egg) have in place to ensure only the very best sperm make it which I am pretty sure is not being simulated in the lab.

Moral of the story is, why are clinics telling people that they can somehow equal the incredibly intricate process of the body? Indeed it is unfair to tell women your body is so dysfunctional even a Petri dish can do better. Why are we telling women one of their most significant bodily functions can bend to their will and easily be outsourced as needed? Why isn’t more money and time being spent to treat fertility issues at the source rather than removing it entirely from the body? I am sick and tired of being lied to by feminists, by institutions who are more concerned with money then the good of people, and most of all when mistakes occur (like this oversight of the nurse addicted to drugs) blaming it on an individual or group (must be the patriarchy!) rather than the the actionable failings of organisational/system level procedures, policies, feedback systems, checks, culture, etc

I suppose that my “assigned” role here is to be the bad guy. Even though I agree with the comments and therefore disagree with the article, my own comment is unlikely to provoke any likes and likely to provoke dislikes.
As I read this article, I became increasingly irritated. I’ve spent almost forty years reading feminist material of just this sort: incessant complaining. Some complaints are justifiable, sure, but others are not. The latter emerge from a gynocentric worldview that privileges the needs and problems of women and ignores those of men. At some point, probably in the 1970s and certainly in the 1980s, feminism transformed itself from a movement that sought sexual equality (fueled by democratic idealism and the civil-rights movement), into one that sought, among other things, sexual revenge (fueled by the centrality of victimology).
Over and over again, Smith resorts to facile comparisons between women and men. I say “facile,” because they hide as much as they reveal. “It’s about the censure,” she says, “that surrounds the whole issue of female fertility: which women can get pregnant, which can’t, which women can stay pregnant, which can’t.” But childless men have faced that problem both historically and cross-culturally. Moreover, many societies have not only considered male bodies “expendable” but also punished men who rebelled or even might rebel. Here’s one more example: “In an era that prizes freedom and choice,” she says, “you [women] are subject to the restriction and unpredictability of your own body.” Tell that to men at war, even to men who work at dangerous jobs or at jobs they don’t like. Actually, physical vulnerability is a universal fact of life in one way or another and always has been. You could even say that it’s among the factors that have produced all religions and philosophies. Smith might not disagree with that. Nor does she lay the blame entirely on men; in fact, she lays part of it on feminism. But she nonetheless turns the rise of new reproduction technologies into yet another rallying cry for women in opposition to men and thus follows the pattern of FINNRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering).
But the problem that I want to highlight here is not so much misandry (which appears in the article several times, notably in a quotation from Catherine MacKinnon, and which I’ve discussed elsewhere) but self-pity. Unlike compassion, which is a moral phenomenon, self-pity is an emotional one. And it flourishes in a society that consistently glorifies emotion and subjectivity (at which women supposedly excel) at the expense of reason and objectivity (at which men supposedly excel). This article, though by no means the most egregious example of navel-gazing, was for me the last straw. Enough already.
And yet self-pity is hardly unique to feminism. By now, it has become the characteristic feature not only of woke ideology but also of other political ideologies (even though one of them, transgender ideology, opposes feminism).
Decades before the rise of wokism, however, self-pity had become a hallmark of popular culture, much of which relied–and still relies–heavily on pop-psychology. This explains the meteoric rise of a vast self-help industry and its therapeutic worldview (one that replaces moral philosophy with something that looks to me like warmed-over psychiatry).
But wait. Underlying that is, almost by definition, the strand of excessive individualism that is inherent in liberalism. Individualism as the source of rights (in opposition to the infinitely more powerful state, as it was until the twentieth century) is one thing, a good thing, but individualism as the matrix of self-pity is something else.
And even that would be tolerable if it were indeed confined to a few individuals. But self-pity has by now become an identity, something that unites individuals within collectivities (victim classes according to sex, race or whatever) but in opposition to other collectivities (one or more oppressor classes) and therefore fragments society as a whole.

I was interested in the first half of the essay, but then the man-hating undercurrent began oozing through in the rest of it. How is ‘the patriarchy’ responsible for women choosing to work high powered careers? This is not worth the (presumably Apple) laptop it was typed up on.

Where is she finding these ‘patriarchal narratives which situate fertility in relation to virtue and women’s ‘natural’ role.’ ?
We live in an individualistic liberal market society, not a ‘Patriarchy’.
A lot of current liberal feminism is just finding spurious causes for resentment in an imaginary ‘Patriarchy’/ invisible oppressing social forces located inside their own heads. Not a healthy way to see the world.
Mary Harrington’s new book is really good though, and outlines a meaningful feminism, within a coherent and realistic framing of our social contexts

“A man’s life proceeds in smooth continuity”
“Sex difference …presented as the justification for restrictions that are cruel and arbitrary”
“threat of infertility so often used as a stick with which to beat women who might otherwise become too liberated”
“failed to prove the traditionalist wrong by having a baby on your own terms,
“shameful…is your desire”

Considering how resentful so many “modern” women are about the “curse” of being able to be a mother and give birth, it’s just as well so many of them will increasingly manage to give it a miss.
Instead of suffering with childbirth and wasting their lives on children, they can spend their 40s and 50s on their careers and complaining about the gender pay gap.

My fert doc in Houston told me that the organization he belonged to tried a publicity campaign about the realities of age but was hounded out of doing it by the feminists who claimed they were taking away opportunities for women’s self discovery. Feminism has been bad for women. I started seeing that years ago but it was confirmed after my own struggles to have babies.

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I waited too late because I as arrogant and chose to believe the fems over common sense advice of friends and acquaintances. I thought tech would save me and it did; however it was at a astronomical cost and self administration of painful shots and procedures. Now I tell everyone to find a suitable mate and rear their children up and out then pursue a career if the compulsion is there. Finding a non insane person who shares similar values is the most important thing you will do.

“Much of the time, infertility and recurrent miscarriage are unexplained, but … we invent reasons for then, and whatever reasons we invent tend to make women themselves the culprit.” Again, we forget that we are mammals, and that a certain number of individuals in every species are infertile or incapable of carrying to term. While this may be a personal disappointment, it is not a personal failing, nor a disease to be treated. How much better off we would be if we remembered we exist as part of a species, and accepted that, as individuals, we don’t always get what we want. There are plenty of children out there who need good parents; we would do well to ask what drives these costly obsessions to instead have our own.