The following is excerpted from the Church News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.

Hannah longed and prayed for children, but it was not happening for her: “And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the Lord, and wept sore,” reads 1 Samuel 1:10.

About Rebekah in Genesis 25, “Isaac entreated the Lord for his wife, because she was barren.” 

Rachel said unto Jacob, “Give me children, or else I die” (Genesis 30:1).

When women are mentioned in the scriptures, often it is because of infertility, explained Brianna Magnusson, an associate professor of public health at Brigham Young University. “It is something men and women have experienced throughout history.”

Jenica Parcell and her husband, in the Timpanogos Utah Stake, were in their 20s when they were trying to have a baby for a year. Then they turned to fertility treatments, and had three failed attempts at intrauterine insemination, or IUI, and two failed rounds of in vitro fertilization, or IVF — including a miscarriage in 2014.

She said she thought, “Wow, this trial isn’t passing. I just figured I’d share when it was over and be like, ‘That was my trial but we got through it and here we are.’”

Parcell was blogging at the time, but not writing anything about the struggles she was going through. “I felt like I was living this double life,” she said.

Seeking reasons

Like Parcell, Magnusson also dealt with infertility. Because her husband survived pediatric cancer, they knew they would need help conceiving. But then it turned out she also needed help on her end.

She has seen data surrounding infertility in the United States both as a patient as an academic in the field of public health.

“We used to say 1 in 8, but numbers indicate if you start drilling down to heterosexual women and really look at women of reproductive age, it’s 1 in 5,” who have difficulty getting pregnant after one year of trying, she said.

Meanwhile, about 1 in 4 (26%) of women have difficulty getting pregnant at all or carrying a pregnancy to term, which is known as impaired fecundity, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

To read the full article, CLICK HERE.