IVF can be an unspoken trauma, even when it brings a baby
I used to think IVF was a chapter that would close the moment a baby arrived, like it would all become a story with a neat ending, and I would finally stop living with so much uncertainty, but the truth is that my body this long period of my life left an imprint.
My infertility journey lasted 11 years, and IVF was on and off for 8 to 9 of those years, and even writing that sentence I can feel the stretch of time it took. It was such a strange time filled with lots and lots of waiting. Not just for babies but for results, appointments, phone calls, updates. It taught me so much about living with uncertainty, living in the in-between, and opening to the mystery of life. But it also took a toll on my nervous system too.
There were cycles where there were zero embryos for a transfer, or one mediocre embryo that was transferred with no backups. Sometimes we (my husband and I) were navigating this quietly with just a few close people aware of the situation and by the end of it we had thrown caution to the wind and I was an open book. Despite the love and support of our community there were obviously times when things went south and somehow we were just to go back to normal life, which we did because it felt far easier to be distracted and because there was always another decision hovering nearby. Would we try again? Same doctor? Do we consider donor? Is adoption the path for us?
And what I didn’t understand then, but I understand now, is that when experiences like this repeat over years, the nervous system often adapts to the pattern of constant uncertainty and high stakes, and those adaptations can continue even when the external circumstances change.¹
The powerlessness that can get under your skin
A lot (not all) of my IVF experience felt like being managed rather than being cared for, and I know not every woman has that experience, but it was a big part of mine.
I remember being told by a fertility doctor who barely knew me that I had less than a 1% chance of having a baby, while he took phone calls during my appointment. I remember that moment because it was a clear message that I was just a number game and that my vulnerability or humanness didn’t matter enough to be handled with attention or respect.
I also remember another doctor during a transfer asking what gender baby I was hoping for, and I still feel that moment like a small shock in my body when I think about it, because it showed me how casually people can speak when you’re in the most tender place of your life, and how alone you can feel inside a system that is meant to be helping you.
And there’s a particular kind of powerlessness in IVF where consent exists on paper but doesn’t always feel like true choice, because the stakes are enormous and the longing is enormous, and you can end up doing things you never imagined you would do, letting your body be poked and measured and discussed, because you’re trying to get to the baby on the other side.
When researchers look at women’s experiences of infertility and IVF, themes like personal reproductive trauma, relationship impacts, and feeling failed by the healthcare system show up again and again, and reading that doesn’t make what happened better, but it does place my story inside a wider reality, rather than leaving it as something I carry alone.²
The losses that don’t have a proper name
One of the hardest parts for me wasn’t only the big losses, it was the repeated micro-losses, the cycles that ended before they began, the hope that rose and then fell, the version of the month that never happened, the imagined baby that didn’t arrive, the way grief kept coming in small waves while life was still moving.
This kind of loss is often hard to explain because it doesn’t always come with a clear event that other people recognise as “a loss”, and it can sit in a strange category where you’re still trying, hoping and madly planning, but you’re also quietly mourning.
The term ambiguous loss has been used to describe losses that are unclear, without closure, and hard to resolve because the situation remains uncertain, and that framework has helped me understand something about infertility, because so much of it is living in-between, with no tidy ending while you’re still in it.³
How IVF can shape the relational world around you
IVF didn’t only happen to my body, it happened to my relationships too. There was at times a rearranging in subtle ways that I can only see more clearly now.
There’s the impact on partnership, because IVF asks couples to live through repeated stress and disappointment and high-stakes decision making, often while trying to protect each other, and sometimes while coping in completely different ways, and the strain is not always loud, but it can be constant.
And there’s also the relationships outside of that. There are the relationships with some friends who had children in the years of waiting that often slowly eroded over time. And then sometimes you find people who are also in it with you, people who understand the language and the terror and the tiny wins and the crushing phone calls. Those connections can feel like oxygen, and then sometimes those relationships change once journeys diverge, once someone becomes a parent and someone doesn’t, or once life moves on.
I want to name this aspect because it’s real, and it can be another quiet grief layered into a story that outsiders only want to read as a happy ending.²
The pressure to be “only grateful”
Once I became pregnant, and then once I became a mother, I could feel the expectation that I should now be finished with all the hard feelings, that I should be glowing. That I should never complain because I finally had what I so deeply wanted.
But gratitude and tenderness can exist in the same body. So too, relief and fear and love and grief.
And when the outside world only gives permission for one emotion, the rest don’t disappear, they just go underground, and often the place they surface is through the body.
After birth, I noticed the legacy in my nervous system
I expected the birth of my babies to be the moment my system finally exhaled, but instead I started noticing how long I had been bracing, and how motherhood, with its own unknowns and its own vulnerability, can activate the same internal pathways that IVF trained into me over years.
There’s research that speaks to this complexity too, because studies have explored mental health during and after pregnancy in women who conceived through medically assisted reproduction, including whether anxiety or other symptoms differ across the perinatal period, and while the broader literature doesn’t reduce to one simple story, it does point to meaningful emotional load for many women who conceive through IVF and ICSI.⁴
There’s also population-based research looking at infertility treatment and postpartum mental illness outcomes, which matters because it challenges the assumption that the psychological impact of infertility treatment ends at birth, and it invites a more honest understanding of what women can carry into motherhood.⁵
I don’t share that to turn my story into a diagnosis, or to make IVF mothers a category of pathology, but because it validates something I felt in my bones, which is that prolonged fertility treatment can leave a residue that can show up later - and in a time when your are navigating the pressures of early motherhood which can be a beast on its own.
The moment my body started to feel like mine again
It wasn’t until I found a fertility team of natural and medical specialists where I felt fully included in the decisions and more autonomy, where I could advocate for myself, where I felt treated like a whole person, that something began to shift inside me.
We ended up transferring two embryos, and they both stuck, and I knew, intuitively, that they both had.
I still hold that moment as something precious, because it was a moment of connection with myself after years of feeling like things were being done to me, and that matters, because so much of IVF can be an experience of disconnection from your own inner authority.
And even with that miracle, even with the babies, I didn’t fully realise until later how much my system had carried through those years, and how much of that carrying deserved tenderness.
This is a reflection for the mums who carry IVF into motherhood
I’m writing this as a personal reflection, not as advice or a list of things to do or an attempt to label every IVF experience as trauma, because people’s stories are diverse and complex.
I’m writing it because there’s a particular loneliness that can come from having everything “work out” on paper while still feeling changed on the inside, and there’s a particular ache that comes from feeling like the world only has space for your gratitude and not for your truth.
And I want to say that IVF can leave a nervous system imprint, that can sit right alongside love, relief and the fierce devotion of motherhood.
For some women, motherhood after IVF is not a single happy ending. It’s an ongoing integration of letting the body catch up to its very real lived experience.
Footnotes
Nemcova H, Blaskova T, Horakova A, et al. Effects of in vitro fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection treatment on female patients' perinatal mental health: systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Reproductive Health. 2025.
Assaysh-Öberg S, et al. Women’s experience of infertility & treatment (meta-ethnographic metasynthesis of qualitative studies; themes include personal reproductive trauma, relationship impact, and being failed by healthcare system and society). Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare. 2023.
Boss P, Yeats JR. Ambiguous loss: a complicated type of grief when loved ones disappear. Bereavement Care. 2014.
Petersen GL, et al. Mental health during and after pregnancy in medically assisted reproduction. Archives of Women’s Mental Health. 2024.
Dayan N, Velez MP, Vigod S, et al. Infertility treatment and postpartum mental illness: a population-based cohort study. CMAJ Open. 2022.
References
Assaysh-Öberg S, et al. (2023). Women’s experience of infertility & treatment. Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare.
Boss P, Yeats JR. (2014). Ambiguous loss: a complicated type of grief when loved ones disappear. Bereavement Care.
Dayan N, Velez MP, Vigod S, et al. (2022). Infertility treatment and postpartum mental illness: a population-based cohort study. CMAJ Open.
Nemcova H, Blaskova T, Horakova A, et al. (2025). Effects of IVF and ICSI treatment on female patients’ perinatal mental health: systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Reproductive Health.
Petersen GL, et al. (2024). Mental health during and after pregnancy in medically assisted reproduction. Archives of Women’s Mental Health.
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