All it takes is a little red to send her to her knees. She’ll cry there on the bathroom floor until she can’t anymore. A childish shuddering breath signals the end of this round. Another month, another try, another failure.

It might sound dramatic, but I know it’s true because she is me.

I want to talk for a minute about the childless mother. The woman who, according to President Russel M. Nelson hasn’t given birth or adopted but “is a mother by virtue of her eternal divine destiny.”

I’ve hesistated to write this piece for several reasons. One, I don’t want to depress people. I don’t want to magnify my problems or make people feel sorry for me. Two, I don’t know that I can accurately represent the range of issues people who struggle with infertility face. I’ve only been trying for nearly four years. I know there are women who have so much more experience with this. Three, I am committed to this blog not becoming a place for a political agenda.

But I feel some things really need to be said.

Let’s start with me.

All I ever wanted was to get married and be a mom. It may sound like a small dream to some, but it was the only one that I cared about with my whole heart. And it wasn’t because I was taught I couldn’t do anything else. That was absolutely not the case. There are many other things I love and want to accomplish in my life. But honestly, I’ve always had trouble saying what my dream job would be. I don’t really have one.

Being a wife and mother was the only thing I couldn’t imagine not doing.

I graduated from high school and all my closest friends got married very quickly. And I…didn’t. I went on a lot of dates, but I just didn’t connect with anyone. Years passed. More friends got married, my little sister got married.

I kept going to school, went on a mission, came home, graduated from college without ever getting close to marriage.

I must admit, I began to believe I wasn’t lovable or, even scarier, wasn’t capable of loving someone. I thought about what I would do if I were single forever. I felt I could choose whatever I wanted, but honestly any career, as exciting as it sounded, just couldn’t fill that void for me.

Then I met Tyler. It wasn’t love at first sight, but I connected with him in a way that I had doubted was possible. He was the perfect blend of patience and persistence, of confidence and adoration. We didn’t agree on everything. He wasn’t a doormat, but he had the highest respect for my wishes and a deep desire to make me happy.

I was relatively old for a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints to be unmarried, but I had no interest in making a poor choice. So, we dated for a little over a year and then got married when I was almost 26.

We decided not to wait to have children. I was a little older and had always said I wanted 6 to 8 children, so I thought I better get started.

I look back with a blend of amusement and pity at my prewedding self. I fully expected a honey-moon baby. I remember thinking my period before the wedding would be the last one for awhile.

And how I cried that first month after the wedding when my period came on the dot. I was so surprised. I bawled like a baby. If I had only known what was to come, I might have saved my tears for later.

My cycle lasts 26 to 28 days, which means I’ve had somewhere between 49 and 54 periods since I started trying to have a baby. That’s a lot of tears.

Some months were worse than others. Some amounted to mild frustration, and some live in my memory still.

I was a week late once, which is extremely rare for me. I started planning how I would tell people, deciding what I’d do about work, having dreams about meeting this baby. While I fell asleep I would imagine things about motherhood. I made a list on my phone of good bedtime songs I don’t want to forget. I imagined reading books together and then having a party where we watch the movie version and make food from the books. I thought of names. The disappointment, I assure you, was excruciating.

Once, I watched The Help right before starting my period. Did I feel compassion for the injustice the African Americans faced during that time period? Absolutely. But the thing that made me lose control was the little girl whose mother did not care about her. It undid me. I sobbed to my husband about the injustice that there were women who had no desire to be mothers who got pregnant without trying or who got pregnant even on contraceptives. There were women aborting babies or leaving them in dumpsters. Would I be that bad? Why didn’t Heavenly Father trust me?

Another time, I had undergone a three month supplement regimen that had worked for many people who struggled to conceive. I was nearing the time when my period would normally start and was hoping and almost expecting that it wouldn’t. I was volunteering in the temple, and I overheard another worker talking with a patron who was obviously pregnant. The worker shared that she just discovered she was pregnant too. They swapped stories of morning sickness and ravenous hunger. I excitedly wondered if I was to join them this time. But when my shift was over, I went downstairs to the locker room bathroom to discover that my period had started during the shift. The timing was cruel. That was one of the darkest nights of my life. I sobbed convulsively for hours. My poor husband. I was utterly inconsolable.

And I decided to give up.

For many months, I didn’t track my period or my symptoms. I didn’t talk about it and didn’t time anything. Those were the only months when I didn’t cry because I had hardened myself. I stopped hoping and stopped being disappointed.

After a few months of that, I decided I didn’t like the person I would have to be in order to not care about getting pregnant. I decided it was time to start tests and see what we could do. We tested Tyler first, and then I underwent several fertility tests.

“Jennifer, I’m calling about the results of your blood work. Everything looks normal.”

Normal.

Normal.

Normal.

Every single test we underwent came back normal.

Instead of feeling comforted, I was infuriated. If everything is normal, why doesn’t it work?! How do you treat “normal?!”

I had never been interested in adoption, but I finally reached the point where I was ready to consider it. My research was disheartening.

The adoption process proved to be so complex and insanely expensive. I read that about 1% of those who look into adoption actually end up doing it. I closed my laptop after coming to the conclusion that if we were ever able to adpt, it wouldn’t be any time soon. My husband will most likely be a student for the next six years or so. Adoption just simply isn’t an option for us right now.

So, here I am. Still waiting, still hoping.

Like I said, my aim is not to make anyone feel sorry for me and is certainly not to inspire any kind of ridiculous guilt in the mothers I know. I have no concept of how hard pregnancy and motherhood is. I am not naive enough to think that it is not excruciatingly painful and exhausting at times.

And I also must say that I love my life and am deeply happy. Nearly everyone I talk to is so kind and compassionate. I know many people who pray for me daily.

I also know that everyone fights battles. Infertility is not the only hard thing.

But it is really hard.

A month is a long time to hope and wait only to have those hopes crash down. Those days leading up to that start of your period are agonizingly long. You’re a couple days late and foolishly decide not to wait to take a pregnancy test. It’s the longest minute waiting for the result.

I have, at times, prayed that I would just dream about having a baby. That, at least while I slept, I could know what that felt like.

I know there are women with much longer and more tragic infertility stories, but I do feel like I am qualified to offer an opinion on this subject because I have lived this.

You’d have to be blind or living without technology to have missed the current political upheaval. I have strong political opinions and try to get information from credible sources and intelligent people, not emotional, social media noise. But I’m not here to talk about the idealogies of a political party.

In my effort to stay informed, I have done quite a bit of research on the issue of abortion. I can’t avoid coming at this from a religious standpoint, but that’s not exactly what I want to talk about today.

Every year, about a million abortions take place in the US. About 92% of these abortions are NOT due to rape or health issues with the mother or baby.

My research led me to Planned Parenthood. Along with other political activists, they are actively pushing for later and later legalized abortion, not to mention refusing medical care to babies born alive after a failed abortion.

The more I read, the more sickened I became. I studied the evidence around allegations that Planned Parenthood sells tissue of the aborted fetuses to research institutions. What I had thought was a conspiracy theory turned out to have a lot more evidence than I realized.

Some extreme groups even advocate the legalization of an “abortion” up to two years of age because that’s when memory starts forming.

Where will the line be drawn?

I then stumbled upon Dr. Anthony Levatino, an abortion doctor who performed over 1200 abortions. He described himself at the time as absolutely pro-choice. He began to change when he and his wife struggled with infertility themselves. They were told they would probably not be able to conceive a child. He started to feel uncomfortable with literally throwing babies in the garbage when he and his wife were trying so hard and couldn’t conceive.

He and his wife finally adopted a little girl and named her Heather. At the age of 6 she was killed in a auto accident in front of their house. He said this of the experience (It may be a little graphic if you’re sensitive, but I think people need to know what we’re talking about here.):

“It didn’t hit me till – I don’t know how long it was after Heather died. It was just a few weeks…You know, what do you do? You bury your child. You take some time off. Then you try to get back in your life… and it was just a few weeks after her death, and I showed up at OR No. 9 at Albany Medical Center, and I was doing second-trimester abortions up to 24 weeks at the time…And I arrived at the hospital to do a second-trimester D&E abortion. And these are absolutely gruesome procedures. I mean, because you’re not talking about a baby an inch long anymore. A 20-week baby is the length of your hand, from the tip of your middle finger to your wrist. That’s head to rump 20 weeks, not counting the legs. And you’re tearing these kids apart literally bit by bit with the instruments. Um, and I wasn’t even thinking of this as anything special. This was routine. I obviously had other things on my mind. So, I went in, and I started the abortion, and I literally ripped out an arm or leg…As I had over a hundred times before in second-trimester abortions. And I just stared at it in the clamp, and I got sick…But when you start an abortion, you can’t stop. I’d said earlier, you have to keep inventory. You have to make sure that you get two arms, two legs and all the pieces because if you don’t, your patient will come back infected, bleeding, or dead. So, I finished the abortion, and now we’re talking a big baby here, not some little tiny one. Um, and you literally stack parts on the side of the table so you can keep inventory. And for the first time in my career – and I know it sounds strange to people, but we always promise telling people that everything we’re saying is firsthand and true. For the first time, I looked. I mean, I really, really looked at that pile of body parts. And I didn’t see her wonderful right to choose, and I didn’t see what a great doctor I was helping her out, and I didn’t even see the $800 cash I just made in 15 minutes. All I could see was somebody’s son or daughter.”

When I see abortion statistics, I feel that too.

The more I researched, the more frustrated I felt. When I’ve tried so hard and cried myself to sleep so many nights trying to get pregnant, and viable fetuses who could live to be human beings are literally being thrown in the garbage. It’s enough to make me crazy.

Now, I don’t think everyone who gets an abortion or performs an abortion is evil. I’m not trying to villify any individuals. I know their stories are complex and painful. I know they are often scared, and it would be foolish to think that a woman who has no desire to be a mother would make a good one.

There are arguments about the difficult life children born to unfit parents live and the burden they become to society, perpetuating a vicious cycle. It is a complex social issue, and I’m not saying it’s not.

But my research on adoption and my research on abortion has led me to wonder if there isn’t a better way.

One in ten women in the United States struggle with getting or staying pregnant. For every 1 couple who adopts, there are about 36 waiting to be able to adopt. And that doesn’t even include those who would consider it but aren’t currently pursuing it actively.

Let me say that again, 10% of women who want to have a baby can’t, meanwhile, we are aborting a million pregnancies in a single year.

Surely, we can do better than this.

Why is so much money being spent legislating, promoting, and performing abortion and none is being spent trying to make adoption a feasible option for these children and parents? Why are these two worlds not being bridged? Thousands of women want a baby and can’t have one; thousands of women are pregnant with babies they don’t want. Surely, there must be a way to bring them together.

I am aware of the argument that making adoption cheaper and easier could make it a target for traffickers and abusers. I am not saying there should be no process to avoid that – background checks, interviews, followups. Fine!

I also know it’s complicated, but these are human lives we are talking about. I believe it’s worth more attention and effort than we’re giving it.

Wherever you stand morally on the issue, tell me, is abortion really the best we can do?

To all the childless mothers out there, my heart breaks for you. I know what it is to wait, weep, and wonder. And to all unwanted children who are neglected, abused, or destroyed, I have cried myself to sleep for you, wishing I could scoop you up and make you feel loved. And to both of you, all I can say is I wish we lived in a better world, where you could come together and heal each other’s broken hearts.