But I did everything right!

In When Bad Things Happen to Good People (a book you'll be hearing about a lot on this blog), Rabbi Harold Kushner tells the story of a couple who lost a child in a tragic accident.  When he goes to visit them, the couple looks at him and says, "Rabbi, we didn't fast on Yom Kippur this year." It takes Kushner a second to realize what they are saying: they think that God took their child as a punishment for not fasting on the day of atonement.

The idea that God punishes wrongdoing by killing children, giving people cancer, and causing various fatal accidents is called the theory of just retribution. With the exception of a few fundamentalist Christians (Michele Bachman, I'm looking at you), most people reject this idea.  We know that God didn't give our aunt breast cancer as punishment for her sins. We know that the tornado that struck the high school prom wasn't punishment for the kids sleeping together on prom night.

I reject the just retribution explanation for my fertility struggles. It's not because I slept with my husband before we were married.  Or because I used contraception. If you think it is, look at all those teenagers who get knocked-up without any problem at all!

But despite the fact I reject the theory of just retribution, I do have my own version of it.  It goes like this:  But I've lived a very healthy life!  I don't drink or eat to excess.  I barely eat sugar.  I have never smoked. I don't eat processed food. I eat ridiculous amounts of vegetables. I exercise regularly, but moderately. I don't even drink coffee, for God's sake!

I did everything right.  This shouldn't be happening to me.

The theory of just retribution is so hard-wired into all of us that we can't quite reject it.  Instead, we have merely substituted health for morality. Healthy food (whether it's vegan or Paleo or gluten-free) is the new kosher. Unhealthy people are punished with infertility.

This attitude is common among the fertile as well.  In this egregious example, a blogger thinks that she got pregnant so quickly because she worked so hard, "reading books, changing eating habits, exercising, not smoking, not drinking, doing tests, taking care of health problems, doing dental work, taking prenatals etc," in short, "doing more" than other people who are trying to conceive.

Um, no. She got pregnant quickly because she was lucky. Some people are just more fertile than others. While some things do adversely impact fertility (smoking, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, etc.) many people who live healthy lives are infertile, while many sugar-gobbling, coffee-guzzling lushes get pregnant with no trouble at all.

Why do we hang on to the theory of just retribution, despite all the evidence that this is not how the world works?

My theory is that it's comforting to this that if we work hard and do everything right, we will be protected from infertility. Conversely, it's frightening to think that infertility (or for that matter cancer)  could strike any of us, for no reason, despite all our efforts and healthy habits.

I've been on enough fertility forums to know that some people get pregnant after making a bunch of lifestyle modifications: diet, exercise, Chinese medicine, herbs, vitamins and supplements. Still others go the Western medicine route to get pregnant. But some people, despite all of their efforts, despite tens of thousands of dollars in fertility treatments, never do get pregnant.

The frightening truth is that we have limited control on whether we ever get pregnant.

The frightening truth is that a lot of really big things in our lives are ultimately beyond our control.

The frightening truth is that this is the human condition.