Infertility is a terrible plague, a legacy of the fall we’re forced to confront all too often in the church. But if God has put infertile people in the pews next to you—and he almost certainly has—he’s given you a tremendous opportunity to sympathize with them, to love them by being a friend, and to encourage them. Be thoughtful, take note of the hurting people around you, and show yourself ready to be a friend.

Five years ago, my wife Andrea and I sat in our church’s Sunday evening prayer service, listening as another couple talked about their struggles with infertility and asked the church to pray for them as they endured surgeries, tests, and the misery of fertility drugs. It didn’t occur to us, at the time, that we might go through the same trial.

Three years later, we found ourselves in the same place, offering up the same prayer requests. We felt left behind by the constant stream of pregnancy and birth announcements in the church, and felt an acute sting when members would jokingly speculate that “there must be something in the water!” For us, infertility was a painful reality.

You will most likely know someone affected by infertility, and you’ll be better prepared to love and minister to them if you know a bit more about what it’s like to go through this trial.

Bigger Problem than You Think

The statistical data on infertility can be difficult to understand. A recent CDC study suggests infertility rates in women have fallen over the last 30 years, to around 6 percent of women, but that doesn’t account for the whole picture, including men who are infertile, unexplained infertility, and women who have difficulty carrying a pregnancy to term. One source estimates that one in eight couples (12.5 percent) are affected by infertility; the Mayo Clinic suggests it may be as high as one in six (17 percent).

Infertility is a private issue, fraught with embarrassment and shame. Because fertility is so bound up with issues of intimacy and sex (taboo topics in their own right), people are reluctant to talk about it publicly, especially in the church. When baby-making machinery doesn’t work correctly, we’re even less inclined to talk about it—after all, the ability of men to father children and of women to carry them is a cultural touchstone of manhood and womanhood. We’re afraid that admitting something is wrong will reflect on us negatively. He’s afraid a low sperm count makes him less of a man. She’s afraid her inability to become a mother means she won’t be able to fulfill what the church often implies is her highest calling.

Infertility can wreak havoc on our relationships, too. What’s wrong with me? can, all too easily, lead to Does he wish he’d married a woman who could give him children? Is she disappointed in me as a husband? Two women who have been friends for years can find their friendship suddenly strained when one gets pregnant, has her baby, and enters the Mom Club while the other is left on the outside, struggling with feelings of discontentment, jealousy, and grief.

My wife and I attend a church full of young families where people seem to have children all the time. Not only does such a church remind infertile couples of their infertility with painful regularity, it can also leave them feeling isolated and alone, out of step with everyone else their age in a different stage of life.

And then there’s the whole world of assisted reproduction and infertility treatments, which can be at times as much a curse as a blessing. Sometimes God uses those treatments to end a couple’s struggle with infertility. Often he doesn’t. And the longer would-be parents pursue them, the more easily they can get wrapped up in the endless cycle of hope and despair recently noted in a New York Times op-ed.

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