Heartache of infertility shared on stage, screen

By Colleen Mastony | Tribune reporter
June 21, 2009

On the illuminated stage, Kathleen Puls Andrade assumed the position of a woman undergoing a gynecological exam: feet propped, legs spread, sheet draped over her lap. Moments later, the red-haired, quick-witted actress-comedian bounded across the stage and broke into an in vitro- inspired song (refrain: "Going up the Hoo-Hah Highway"). She played a mock-educational animated film (featuring "Uta," a smiling cartoon uterus), donned a white coat to goof on her doctors and then turned to riff on the wacky but well-meaning advice she's received from friends ("Just have more sex!").

Five years of fertility treatments might not have resulted in a baby for Puls Andrade, but all those shots and specialists did help her give birth to a one-woman show, "Journey to the Center of the Uterus: Adventures Infertility!" which ran in workshop performances last month and premieres at Chicago's Greenhouse Theater Center in September. "Fertility treatments are so stressful. It's a roller coaster of emotions," she said. "You've got to find the funny in it somewhere."

The fortysomething Puls Andrade isn't the only one who has found inspiration amid the hope and heartache of artificial insemination. As more women undergo such procedures, fertility is having its moment in the spotlight with petri dishes and embryo transfers increasingly turning up onstage and on movie screens.

Jennifer Aniston recently wrapped filming on "The Baster," a movie about an unmarried 40-year-old who uses donor sperm to get pregnant. And Jennifer Lopez will soon deliver "The Back-Up Plan," about a single woman who conceives twins through artificial insemination, only to meet the man of her dreams on the same day.

Due out next year, these films arrive in the wake of hit movies "Baby Mama" and "Juno," as well as television shows such as "Jon & Kate Plus 8" and "18 Kids and Counting," all of which mine women's fertility, or lack thereof, for comedy and drama.

Why the sudden close-up on medically assisted babymaking?

Entertainment executives say that the false starts and dashed hopes of fertility treatments simply make for great stories.

"There's so many trials and tribulations," said Alon Orstein, an executive producer at Discovery Health, a network that first conceived of the program "18 Kids and Counting." "People are having obstacles thrown in front of them again and again. It's this perfect story line to follow."

What's more, viewers can often relate to plots involving hormone shots and ovulation schedules.

"There's so many parents who have been through this struggle to get pregnant. If they haven't, then they know someone who has. All this stuff is so relatable," Orstein said. "It becomes really good TV."

Though in vitro fertilization has been around for decades, Martha Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, said that it makes sense that the topic would be slow to appear in a big way on TV and movie screens.

"It's always the case that media content lags a bit behind what's happening in the real world," Lauzen said. And when a show or movie becomes a hit, entertainment executives often try to spin off similar variations. "When one product does reasonably well, everyone else jumps on board."

Which helps explain why you can now turn on your television to see "Jon & Kate Plus 8," which follows Jon and Kate Gosselin and their eight children, one set of twins and one set of sextuplets, all the result of intrauterine insemination. This month, WE tv launched "Raising Sextuplets," another brood that got a boost from a fertility doctor. And Discovery Health offers "Deliver Me," about a group of ob/ gyn doctors specializing in high-risk pregnancies. Adding to the
drama: One of the doctors yearns to get pregnant herself and eventually undergoes zygote intrafallopian transfer.

"Here's a woman who delivers babies all the time. She's treating moms who are dealing with miscarriages and struggling to get pregnant,"
said Orstein of Discovery Health. "Then she finds herself in the exact same boat."

Critics say that such programs, at their worst, take advantage of a sensitive topic for entertainment's sake. (They point to this year's "The Unborn," which used a stillbirth as the basis of a horror movie.) But delicately handled and intelligently approached, shows and films have the power to comfort and illuminate.

"They can make a person feel less alone," said Melissa Ford, writer of the fertility blog Stirrup-Queens.com and author of the book "Navigating the Land of If: Understanding Infertility and Exploring Your Options" (Seal Press, 2009). She noted that the movie "Up"
handled the topic of infertility -- in a flashback that showed a young woman weeping in a doctor's office -- with sensitivity and care. "Sitting in the theater, I thought, 'There's someone at Pixar who gets it.' "

Many see the recent depiction of fertility issues on stage and screen as a societal shift away from a time when the topic was stigmatized and discussed only in whispers, if at all. In a nod to how much has changed, Puls Andrade, who wrote "Journey to the Center of the Uterus," included in her show a recorded conversation with an 85-year- old woman who found out that she couldn't have children in the 1950s, when there was little hope of treatment. The playwright's goal is to offer support and help people learn. To that end, Puls Andrade takes care to find the humor amid the heartache.

"There's power in laughter," she said. "Part of the reason I wrote this was to give others -- whether they are going through the process, or they know someone going through the process -- some perspective on the journey and to make them laugh."