INCONCEIVABLE
WHEN CATHERINE was in her late 20s, she and her husband decided to start a family. She had always assumed it would be easy—her friends seemed to get pregnant without even trying. But after three years, she still didn’t have a baby. A fertility specialist prescribed medications. They didn’t work, so the doctor tried inserting Catherine’s husband’s sperm directly into her uterus, a procedure called intrauterine insemination. Still no luck. “I felt like a failure,” she later wrote on her blog. “Even with medical assistance I couldn’t complete the one task that my body was created for. I could have filled buckets with the amount of tears I cried.”
She tried a few more rounds of artificial insemination, and when that didn’t work her doctor suggested in vitro fertilization (IVF). The thought of more procedures and drugs exhausted Catherine, and her fertility medications made her prone to wild mood swings and fatigue. So when a friend recommended a different kind of fertility expert, Catherine was all ears. Her friend had been seeing a doctor who practiced a technique called NaPro, short for “natural procreative technology.” She assured Catherine that the NaPro doctor could determine the underlying cause of her infertility—which Catherine’s current doctor had never been able to do.
Catherine, who asked to
