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Founded over fifty years ago, the ASRM's nearly 9,000 members are professionals devoted to research and treatment in the fields of reproductive medicine and biology. The ad campaign is the organization's first widespread attempt at public education and is aimed at men and women in their twenties and early thirties. In the first week after the prevention efforts were announced, news of the campaign and its message received coverage by Newsweek magazine, NBC's Today show and Nightly News, and newspapers across the country.
INCIID was founded in 1995 by three women who learned firsthand about the power of the Internet to enhance lives. The organization utilizes both paid staff and volunteers to offer information and support through their website to infertility consumers. The non-profit group says they attempted years ago to launch a "Fertility Preservation Campaign" but were unable to find needed funding.
In response to their dissatisfaction with the ASRM infertility prevention campaign, INCIID created an online forum where patients and others can vent their feelings, in many cases strong ones, about the effort. At the heart of their complaint is a sense of stigma common to many who experience infertility. They believe this stigma will be further enhanced by the ASRM's focus on lifestyle choices leading to infertility.
In an interview, Venet Grant said that most of her website's consumers were complaining "that the campaign implies that infertility is a 'preventable' disease caused by poor lifestyle choices." She goes on to add that "this kind of of 'shock advertising' does nothing to get our causes of infertility [such as inherited diseases] out of the closet, and in fact further stigmatizes those who struggle to have biological children."
The advertising in question is a series of four billboards that will soon be seen by commuters in Chicago, New York City, and Seattle. Each board uses the image of a baby bottle and text to explain how factors such as age, smoking. weight, and sexually transmitted infection can hamper future fertility.
Says Venet Grant, "We believe this campaign oversimplifies, in the general consumer's view, the causes of infertility."
Some posts on the INCIID board refer to a concern that the more often lifestyle choices are indicated as an infertility cause, especially by a group with ASRM's reputation, the less likely insurance companies are to cover diagnosis and treatment of fertility issues.
Still others decry the ads as sexist, implying that the lifestyle choices are illustrated as being primarily women's issues. In fact, the ASRM and others regularly state that of diagnosed infertility cases, the male-female cause breakdown is roughly down the middle.
Aside from that breakdown, there is no good way of collecting data to give a realistic idea about the percentages of infertility causes. Part of the problem is simply that many who are infertile don't yet know it, and many who are having trouble conceiving are not seeking fertility assistance. So, the numbers do not exist to tell us how many people are experiencing infertility as a result of lifestyle choices versus those who have an inherited disease, a congenital condition, or any of the other myriad causes.
For their part in this question, INCIID plans to offer a consumer survey in the near future to help "put together a picture about the most common diagnoses, and whether poor lifestyle choices may have had an effect on the fertility of those seeking treatment." They expect to announce results in October 2001.
© Tracy Morris
