A New Genre

One thing I appreciate about how our culture and technology are changing is that people have the opportunity to be more open about certain issues than they perhaps were in the past. Certainly there are some areas of openness I am not particularly interested in (everyone has their boundaries), but for the most part, I think this trend is healthy.

One area people have begun to communicate about more frequently is pregnancy. How far we have come from the sad days when pregnant women were somewhat of an embarrassment to society and often were encouraged to stay at home in those later months to preserve their dignity. Now, all over the web--and more often in the rest of society--women are sharing about their experiences. They talk about hopes and fears, about frightening or encouraging physical symptoms, about related financial and relational issues. But they are not just speaking; by sharing this experience, they become members of an informative and (often) encouraging online community.

Even more recently and to a lesser extent, women have written about the flipside of this experience: infertility. Technology and effective use of the internet have begun to bring a sense of community to those struggling in this difficult-to-discuss and sometimes taboo (!) area. Women and men who have experienced the pain of not being able to conceive naturally and/or are enduring the rollercoaster journey of different treatments have found at least a small sense of hope through websites, forums, and blogs dedicated to the topic.

I have always been interested and invested in this part of women's lives--pregnancy/infertility--and I am thinking about researching and writing about this social use of technology.

But I want to be careful . . .

Careful not to be overly "objective," letting statistics, facts, and jargon academize this very personal issue.

Careful not to sound like I understand what it means to be infertile--which would be something like a writer being too authoritative when writing about the experience of Holocaust survivors, I think.

Careful to make my research and ideas helpful . . . to someone  . . . in some way.