Assisted Fertility
Speakers: Beverly Sanders (click here for biography)
Soap Summit 4

Transcript of Proceedings
October 9, 1999

SONNY FOX: Now, we're going to launch into the first of our areas of beginnings and endings with technologically assisted fertility as the subject. This is a country where technology has outpaced our ability to think about the ramifications of divorcing maternity from childbirth.

Before we get into the larger part of it, I thought it would be valuable to think about what it means to the individual who's engaged in the process of trying to have a child, to become pregnant through these new methods. In casting about how to do this, we were lucky enough to come across Beverly Sanders. Beverly is an actress who is one of the most successful commercial actresses in the country and her face, I'm sure, will be familiar to most you, if not her actual acting. She's acted extensively in motion pictures and on television.

What's most important to us is that some years ago Beverly went through what you are going to be hearing about from our presenters later, which is the process of trying to become pregnant in assisted ways. She went through that for some time before she had to give up on that. But she took that experience and that pain, the emotional and the physical costs of going through that process and she turned it into a very interesting one-woman show called Yes Sir, That's My Baby which is currently being seen in the Los Angeles area. The show runs almost an hour and a half. You have to remember that this is not just a play, this is Beverly's life we're going to be looking at. She has been able to make it into an engaging, theatrical experience for us all to actually laugh and sometimes cry when she performs it.

I have asked Beverly to fly in from the coast with her producer. The producer was coming anyway, because she is Lucy Johnson, Vice President of CBS Daytime, who is currently in the booth there, ready to cue up some sound. Beverly will share about 15 minutes of the play with us in order to give you a sense of what the urgencies are when a woman starts to go through this process.

BEVERLY SANDERS: Fall in love, 38. Get married, 38. Want to be a mom, 38. Loose the diaphragm, start having fun. Two months, three months, uh oh, not pregnant, call the doctor. Start taking temperature when it goes up, fuck. Four months, feel the pressure. Five months, call the doctor. Relax, take a vacation, no stress, lose the thermometer. Six months, call the doctor. Listen, you're older now, your eggs are rotting. Lovely thought, thanks doc. Seven months, go to a specialist, start taking tests. Tubes blown, all clear. Ouch, that hurt. Took a little piece of the uterus, sorry dear.

Go to the hospital, weird procedure. Explore. Everything clear, looking good. Why can't I get pregnant? Unexplained. Start testing husband. Sperm count very high. He feels good. One year, drugs for me, chlomide, inseminate. Pergonal, inseminate. Is this a joke? Putting on make-up in front of my very own house, in my car, at 7:30 in the morning. Why, you ask yourself, am I doing this? Well, because my husband is inside the house masturbating into a plastic cup, designed especially to collect sperm in. See my husband can't masturbate if I'm in the house, even if it is a 2,000 square foot home with a master bedroom far enough away from a bathroom to even know if anybody's there.

The reason he's doing this is so that we can, within the hour, drive into Beverly Hills and take this sperm to a lab. Now that lab is going to separate the sperm and a portion gets to go to Hawaii and be tested for allergies. The other portion gets to go across the street and be inseminated. Oh, we both have to go this time because one of us needs to drive and one of us needs to hold the plastic cup to keep the sperm warm. Oh, God. See there's my biggest nightmare, my neighbor Linda. Okay just don't say anything.

Hi Linda, how are you? I said don't say anything. See, there she goes again. You see I have this four-year-old, pig tailed monster inhabiting my body. I've spent years and money in therapy just trying to get rid of. Oh, see, look this is good. Linda's turning, she's going back into her house. Okay say no more. I'm just waiting for Harvey, we have this early morning appointment with the doctor. It's nothing serious, just some fertility business. Uh, huh, Okay so therapy is not working. Oh, good, there's Harvey. See Linda standing there smiling at him, giving him the thumb's up sign. Hi, honey. What did you tell Linda? Did you tell her what I was doing in there? Of course not. I simply said we had an early morning appointment with a fertility specialist. And I walked out with this brown paper bag? Oh, will you stop it, come on. Look, let's not argue. Honey look at this. Isn't this romantic? Here we are with sperm to last our whole life long.

Speaking of sperm, you know they have to figure out exactly what time you collected it. Okay you got to the car around eight o'clock. So allowing for the time it took you to get up, get dressed, wash your hands, hand and get out here, let's say, that you collected this at 7:55. All right, so that means that we have to be in Beverly Hills by 8:55. Uh hah, this is good, you see we're half way over Coldwater and it's 8:30. I have been so edgy all morning. I just, oh, my god Harvey, look, look at me, I'm covered in ants. Oh, god, where are these coming from. Oh, look, they're on this newspaper I put in here this morning. Oh, they're trying to get into the sperm. Can you imagine them getting the sample in Hawaii and saying, ah, there's our problem, ants. And for this test we paid $1,000? All right, this is good, it's 8:45 and we're in Beverly Hills. Now, it's 825 Bedford. Honey, you are driving so fast, I can't see the numbers. All right, here, good. 829, 27, 23. Oh, we missed it. All right, I'll tell you what, go around the block, no don't go around the block.

Just park right here in the red zone. No you will not get a ticket if you sit in the car, you leave your hazard lights flashing, right here Harvey, right in the red zone. You turned, okay, I jump out of the car and start running up and down the block, I must have run up and down the block 20 times, when, it's 8:50, I see it 825 Bedford, it has it's own entrance. Bolt up the stairs, I run into the lab where there's a young technician on the phone. I knock on the glass partition separating my voice from hers. She holds up the wait a minute finger. I knock again, see this where the pigtailed monster comes in handy. Finally she opens the pearly gates and with that hand, with sweat trickling down my neck I say, "Is it too late to do anything with this?" We were ten minutes too late.

So I make an appointment for next week. But this time the sperm will be collected at the lab. I leave the office and as I walk down to the street I notice that I'm still clutching this brown paper bag. It's as if it had become an appendage of my body. I eye one of those lovely wire receptacles in Beverly Hills and I unloosen by grasp on my protected bag. Then I see Harvey. Sitting in a red zone with his hazard lights flashing, And I'm thinking I have one week to convince him that there will be a private room at the lab for him to collect sperm in.

Tap dances, that's what I do to get what I want. Moving, talking, faster than the brain can think. I know, I'll simply say, honey, of course they have a private room. They have a sperm plane to Hawaii. Oh, god. I hate the fact that I can't get pregnant You know, my dad used to always say, just keep plugging, don't take no for an answer, you'll get what you want. I feel like such a failure. I mean, let's face it, it's a woman's responsibility unless there's something terribly wrong with the man. I must be doing something wrong. You see, it was supposed to be so simple.

I had this plan, have a career, get married, have a child. Simple. What is it? Why is it so hard? Why can't I get pregnant? Unexplained infertility. Hey, in vitro, why not? Tubes all clear. What now? Psychological group. Dr. Sadler suggested that I join this group that he had sent some of his other patients to. Now, I love therapy, as long as it's one on one. You see the shrink talks about me. I talk about me. The whole thing is about me. I don't want a group. I don't want to share.

But you see after all these years of therapy I knew that if I didn't want to go, I probably should. So, the best way to describe this group was seven women sitting in a room, praying for morning sickness. There was this woman, Rochelle that's how she said it, Rochelle. She came in one week, she said, I am so angry. I am so pissed off at my husband, you know that ever since the reverse vasectomy his sperm count has been low. So even with the chlomide he's still shooting blanks, if you know what I mean. So last week I am so depressed because I got my period.

So I happen to suggest that maybe next month I will do my Pergonal, but I'll be inseminated with sperm from the sperm bank. Well, he goes ape-shit, he starts screaming at me. What? After all I've been through for you, you want another man's baby. I said, will you stop it. I didn't say that I wanted to screw him, I simply said I wanted his sperm. Well then get this, he said, yeah, but the baby won't have my genes, the baby won't look like me. You all saw my husband a few weeks ago, be honest, if that baby doesn't look like him, would that be so awful?

Respond doctor, respond. You can all be parents and not get pregnant. How? Adopt. Adopt? I want to be a mom. Adopt. And that's what we did. We adopted a beautiful girl and she's now 15 years old. She's also going through puberty, but then, I'm going through menopause. My husband is just trying to stay out of the way of the mood swings. Well, that's my next world. Thank you.