A registered Canadian charity that provides information, support and referral on issues related to infertility, miscarriage, donor conception and adoption,
The Infertility Network was founded in the summer of 1989, at the height of my infertility crisis. I phoned every women's organization in Toronto that I could think of looking for information and support. I thought that, surely, in a city of 3,000,000 people there must be something or somewhere I could go. I met with many dead ends and was referred in circles, until someone suggested that I call Planned Parenthood in Ottawa and they told me about the Infertility Awareness Association of Canada (IAAC).
I still remember that first phone call with Trish Maynard, then IAAC Executive Director, and the sense of relief that, finally, someone understood my pain. When Trish asked if I wanted my name given out to other people who called from the Toronto area, I jumped at the idea.
I didn't know one other infertile person! I had no source of support. I was getting all the comments most infertile people hear:
Just put it out of your mind and you'll get pregnant Just adopt
I was part of the first generation to have ready access to (what was supposedly) reliable and safe birth control and I assumed that once I stopped using it, I would get pregnant. When this didn't happen, it seemed as though I had lost control over my body and my life. I felt a deep sadness about the miscarriages, as though I had failed those babies in being unable to carry them to term and that my body had failed me.
The other person who helped me through this difficult time was Joan Wright of the Regional Women's Health Centre who asked: ??Do you feel as if people are trying to hurry you along, that they want you to be somewhere other than where you are??
By the fall of 1990, IAAC had put together some materials to help people establish support groups and I phoned everyone I'd had any contact with about infertility. That was the beginning! 10 people attended that first meeting. Most of them stayed around and a few others joined us while we spent the first year laying the groundwork.
Most of our time was spent compiling a list of community resources (doctors, clinics, counsellors, adoption agencies, etc.) that eventually became a reference for our telephone support committee; Cathy Ruberto, Manager of Repromed Ltd., did a large part of the research. Linda Russell, a volunteer with a sales background, encouraged us to put a value on our work, and convinced us that patients and clinics would pay money for the information we had gathered.
In late 1991, volunteers Lea Eliopoulos and Sherry Franz planned our first seminar series. Our very first donation (from IVF Canada) paid for printing the advertising flyer and the Regional Women's Health Centre generously agreed to provide free meeting space.
The first series was sold as a package deal: one seminar a week for 6 weeks, and covered a wide variety of topics. We did one night on ??Choices? which included donor insemination, adoption, and childfree living, quickly discovering in the process that each of these was an evening in itself.
The situation became unbearable after an article in the April 1992 Toronto Star produced 100 phone calls within a few days; the seminar registrations paid for a separate phone line and we set up a Telephone Support Committee.
We've since given hundreds of interviews to the radio, TV, and print media, and lost our fear of public speaking along the way. We became very active politically in an effort to stop the Ontario government delisting IVF from the provincial medicare plan. In the course of this long and exhausting fight, we organized a phone/fax/mail campaign (to the Ministry of Health, the Opposition Parties, and the Ontario Medical Association), met with the government and the Opposition Health Critics, presented written and oral briefs to the Joint Review Panel on de-listing, and held a press conference at the Ontario Legislature which featured another co-founder, Kathleen Taylor, and her IVF baby, and Deborah Tennant, the chair of our Media Committee, who was then pregnant through IVF. The legal background of Debra McNevin, then our Advocacy Committee Chair, was a tremendous resource in developing detailed and well-researched arguments.
In 1995 we incorporated as the Infertility Network in order to:
Make us eligible for Board development workshops and other United Way services.
In 1996, Revenue Canada granted us charitable status.
What Self Help Can Accomplish
25 years ago in the United States, one woman, Barbara Eck Menning, was looking for information and support for her infertility, and, finding nothing, decided to do something about it. She started Resolve (R.E.S.O.L.V.E) that now has 25,000 members with chapters in every state offering support.
In Canada, there is now a support group in most provinces, started and maintained by the hard work and dedicated efforts of many volunteers. I encourage you to get involved in the group closest to you, or to start one yourself if none is available. (We can help you do this!) The Infertility Network tries to stay in regular contact with all these groups to share information, ideas and strategies.
