The Sunday Morning News

As I was doing laundry today, I listened to some news from several Asian channels on YouTube. And I just couldn’t believe my ears. This is what I heard.

It was about this well known woman–it really didn’t matter she was well known or not since it could happen to anybody. She was married in her 30s and couldn’t conceive a baby. So she went through IVF (In Vitro Fertilization). About a dozen times. And still she couldn’t. Then in her 40s, she got cancer. Somehow I suspect that her cancer was caused in some way by IVF, although there’s no proof of that. Her husband had several affairs, but of course as she wanted to be “a good woman” no matter what, she didn’t want to divorce him. Then she got so depressed that she just killed herself.

I just can’t believe this. I mean she’s a professional and has a successful career. She has parents and siblings who love her, friends who adore her. However she just wants to throw all this away to go to chase after an unfaithful man and torture herself into sickness in order to have a baby. So typical. I think a lot of women are just big masochists who cannot stop torturing themselves. It doesn’t matter rich or poor, professional or stay-at-home, young or old, black or white or brown.

There’s a local IVF horror story that I learned several years ago. True story. This woman worked for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. Same as her husband. For years, they tried to conceive but with no success. So she went through IVF many times and finally she became pregnant. Guess what? Two or three months later, she suddenly fell ill and was sent to hospital. It turned out that she was suffering from a disease that caused nerve damage in her limbs–eventually she had to go through amputation. Her husband was so horrified that he had a nervous breakdown. Her parents came to see her from overseas. And they were so kind that they took care of her. Such parents are good parents of course, but I hope such parents had instilled in their daughter a notion of taking care of herself first, knowing herself and her own health conditions so that she didn’t torture herself. But of course that’s too much to wish for. Her parents just wanted their daughter to adhere to an outdated tradition that a woman has to give birth to a child no matter how dangerous it is to her own health.

Anyway, IVF has a very low success rate–only 15% for women above 35 and even lower for women above 40. And it is very common in the Asian immigrant community that a couple delay having children due to job insecurity, money issues, and other considerations. And I have witnessed several women who tried so hard to get pregnant in their late 30s that they were totally drained, exhausted, depleted. One of them was K, who looked 20 years older than her age after going through several unsuccessful IVF.

Sorry I digressed. Now back to this well known woman who just died. There are a lot of people on social media discussing this. Most just dwell on the fact that her husband is heartless. Well, I have to say I have always thought that she should not have married him in the first place since he looks quite superficial and smug, judging from the photos. Still, I think it is a little unfair to blame him for her suicide. I think the main reason is that she had been beating herself up to fit in a traditional role. And she made herself sick and depressed along the way. Tradition can be very heartless and deadly to women who believe in it, chase after it, and idolize it without considering its suitability to her own life.

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Image by Markus Spiske from Pixabay