Health

This Couple Is Brilliantly Tackling the Struggle of Infertility

May 10th 2016

Facebook and Instagram users are plenty familiar with the pregnancy announcement photo.

While social media pregnancy announcements are exciting, they can also leave couples who face fertility challenges feeling left out

This is why Spencer and Whitney Blake, a married couple with two adopted children in Idaho, started blogging about their fertility challenges alongside a series of humorous photos.

Spencer and Whitney BlakeSpencer and Whitney Blake

For Infertility Awareness Week, which took place in late April, the Blakes shared humorous re-creations of common pregnancy announcement photos (i.e., smiling in front of an oven) next to satirical photos that express their infertility frustrations.

The Dream:

Spencer and Whitney BlakeSpencer and Whitney Blake - co.uk

The Reality:

Spencer and Whitney BlakeSpencer and Whitney Blake - co.uk

"When we were in the heart of our struggle with infertility, we sometimes used humor as a coping mechanism," the Blakes told ATTN: in an email statement. "We realize that is not how everyone deals with challenges, but for us personally, for this particular problem, we found that having a sense of humor made infertility a bit more bearable. Humor sometimes makes difficult topics a bit easier to talk about, maybe that's why the announcements spread as much as they have?"

The Dream:

Spencer and Whitney BlakeSpencer and Whitney Blake - co.uk

The Reality:

Spencer and Whitney BlakeSpencer and Whitney Blake - co.uk

The Blakes told ATTN: via email that their project stemmed from a conversation about the difficulty of exposure to pregnancy announcements on social media.

"We were on a road trip and our conversation turned to infertility and how pregnancy announcements can sometimes be hard for people like us to read/hear, even when we're legitimately happy for the people," they said in a statement. "We started thinking it would be funny to create our own infertile equivalents. Humor has always been one of our coping mechanisms. We jotted some ideas down in the car to start working on them as soon as we got home."

The Dream:

Spencer and Whitney BlakeSpencer and Whitney Blake - co.uk

The Reality:

Spencer and Whitney BlakeSpencer and Whitney Blake - co.uk

The Blakes' project seems to have struck a nerve. 

FacebookFacebook - facebook.com

FacebookFacebook - facebook.com

Fertility challenges are common.

It's possible that the Blakes' photos have struck a chord with lots of people because fertility issues are more common than many realize. According to the CDC's National Survey of Family Growth, more than ten percent of women have received infertility services at some point in life. Twelve percent of married women have reported struggling to get pregnant or maintain a pregnancy.

In recent months, several high profile individuals have fought the stigma surrounding fertility struggles by opening up about experiencing the issue themselves. Last year, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed that his wife was pregnant, he opened up about the fact that she'd previously suffered miscarriages.

Last fall, model Chrissy Teigen confessed to struggling with infertility on the show "FABLife," advising others not to ask women when they're having kids because these women might be having trouble getting pregnant.

"Anytime somebody asks me if I'm going to have kids, I'm like, 'one day, you're going to ask that to the wrong girl who's really struggling, and it's going to be really hurtful to them,'" Teigen said. "And I hate that. So, I hate it. Stop asking me!"

[H/T BuzzFeed News]

RELATED: What Not To Ask Couples Trying To Have Kids

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