‘I couldn’t believe this act of kindness’: how Black women trying to get pregnant create their own healthcare networks

For many Black women in the US, infertility has a complicated duality. The inability to conceive is often invisible, pushed out of view by shame, the racist notion that Black women are hyper-fertile, or the idea that such struggles should remain private. Yet for people aspiring to parenthood amid fertility problems, getting the family they want often requires complete transparency about their condition.

Community support is particularly critical for Black women, who face a slew of health disparities in fertility medicine. They’re much less likely to be referred by doctors for fertility treatment – perhaps due to the myth Black women get pregnant with ease – even though studies suggest that they experience infertility at a rate twice as high as white women. 

Black women are also less likely than white women to have insurance. Even if they do, full coverage for procedures such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), in which a harvested egg is united with sperm outside the body and later implanted, or intrauterine insemination (IUI), where sperm gets a fast-track injection into the uterus, is rare.

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