August 20, 2001

Pastor seeks to educate church on infertility
___By Jennifer Lee
___Virginia Religious Herald
___MECHANICSVILLE, Va.--When Bob Lee set out to study how to minister to couples facing infertility, he didn't know he would be among those who needed ministry.
___While a student at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Lee took a class called "The Minister as Crisis Counselor" with Dan Bagby as professor. As a class requirement, each student chose a crisis and followed it through the semester.
___Lee chose the crisis of infertility because he knew several couples having difficulty in conceiving and hoped to help them.
___Lee and his wife, Melanie, had no children at the time but were trying to start a family. "Being that I was in seminary, we were not seeking treatment; we just thought it was taking a long time," he said. "All this time, we were actually going through it, and we just didn't know it."
___Their doctor recognized the problem and referred the couple to a fertility specialist. Then the Lees were forced to deal with the issue on a personal level.
___"One of the key moments I really knew God was in the midst of our struggle was when the doctor told us we had a very slim chance of having a biological child--from 0 percent to 5 percent. I went back to the paper I'd written in seminary and reread it with a different set of lenses."
___Lee, pastor of New Highland Baptist Church in Mechanicsville, Va., realized even more the importance of an appropriate response from the church toward the issue. "I speak to this issue now as a pastor but also as a person who is in the middle of this crisis, so I speak from the heart and from my wife's and my personal experience.
___"I have felt a need to help educate other pastors and church ministers about this issue because it is a secret most of the time. More often than not, people don't talk about it. In the church especially, the issue is often swept under the carpet--it's not talked about like cancer or illness.
___"In the church, people have divorce-recovery workshops, marriage enrichment seminars, child-raising seminars, employment seminars, spirituality seminars--and nothing is wrong with those, but you don't hear much about infertility."
___Lee recently gave a seminar at a meeting of pastors from Dover Baptist Association in Virginia. The presentation was based on his seminary paper, outlining myths, facts and resources about infertility as well as some appropriate pastoral responses.
___Infertility is defined as the inability to become pregnant after one year of having regular sexual intercourse without regular use of contraception. An estimated 2.1 million married couples in the United States are infertile. Infertility is a medical condition that can have a variety of causes and treatments. Males and females are equally likely to contribute to the problem, and in 10 percent of cases, infertility is unexplained.
___"A lot of times people will place blame or point fingers or say it's the woman's fault or the husband's fault, but there should be no blaming," Lee said. "This is a medical condition that many times can't be explained.
___"Nobody did anything wrong and has been given infertility as a penalty for that. I don't believe that's how God would have intended it. I don't believe God causes people to be infertile; it just happens, and we have to deal with it."
___Infertile couples face a variety of medical options, including fertility drugs, artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, egg or sperm donation, embryo adoption and surrogacy. The couple, along with medical specialists, can determine what treatments to pursue based on the specific medical problem, moral and ethical beliefs and financial abilities.
___In-vitro fertilization can cost from $10,000 to $15,000 per attempt, and most health insurance providers do not cover fertility treatments.
___Many couples spend their life's savings and go into debt trying to conceive a child, which makes failures even more devastating, Lee noted.
___When dealing with issues that can be very complex, Lee advised being educated about the procedures before forming fixed opinions.
___"There are a lot of technologies out there these days," he said. "Before an individual, a denominational entity or a minister condemns a couple for a medical procedure, they need to know exactly what they're talking about and they need to know what a couple who has been trying unsuccessfully for 10 years to have a child has been going through."
___While adoption may be an option for infertile couples, they must first deal with the psychological aspects of infertility, Lee said. "Before you can adopt, many couples have to grieve the death of not having a biological child."
___And the endless tests and questioning eventually take a toll, he explained.
___"We've been through many, many kinds of tests and treatments and failures. We've cried a lot. We've experienced grief and depression and despair. But I want people to know that God has been in the midst of it all."
___Lee said he has found help in the support of his church and other ministers.
___"Theologically, I've found hope in the Scriptures," he said. "There are more psalms of lament than there are any other type of psalms. I find hope in the fact that the psalmist could express his lament to God. That gives me and it gives all God's children the freedom to express our grief to God."
___ For additional information on fertility and infertility counseling, visit www.resolve.org, www.endometriosisassn.org, www.hannah.org, www.vipcare.org.

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