Let's explore how your ties to ever-changing nature and your evolutionary past can impact on your ability to conceive and bear a child.
It is simply not enough to address issues of fertility on the level of hormones or such mechanical obstructions as endometriosis, or even from a view of a person as an integrated mind-body system. We must approach fertility from an even broader, more profound perspective that also takes into account a primal drive that tells you when to reproduce and when not to reproduce in order to ensure the survival of our species.
Fertility and the Drive to Survive
Reproduction is an extremely primitive urge, a built-in evolutionary drive we can trace back even to primordial life forms such as algae and bacteria. It has been going on for billions of years. Reproduction could even serve as the definition of life itself -- life is that which seeks to replicate itself in the struggle to survive.
As Peter T. Ellison notes in On Fertile Ground: A Natural History of Human Reproduction, we "see in the details of our reproductive physiology the imprint of natural selection and the trace of our evolution."
How does this affect your own ability to conceive and bear a healthy child? The study of ecology and Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest tell us that the species that survive are best able to adapt to their specific environments. We know human physiology is not fixed, and that our major survival tactic is the ability to adjust our bodies continually in response to changes in the environment.
Over the course of human history, nature has fine-tuned us to reproduce in the most efficient way possible. We know this from observing reproductive patterns. We've reproduced more when food is plentiful enough to nourish expectant mothers and their infants, and reproduced less when nourishment is too scarce to support pregnancy and new life. Likewise, during times of danger, war, or famine, when the human race or individual lives - especially new ones - were in jeopardy, fertility rates dropped - our bodies adapted by protecting the few precious eggs we had through shutting down ovulation. This self-protective system in which innate wisdom guides the ebb and flow of our reproduction patterns as a species has kept us going for hundreds of thousands of years. We know too that when other animal species- our relatives - are under duress, they also experience lower fertility. For example, it is well known that animals in captivity have difficulty reproducing. In fact, they seldom reproduce unless they do so after artificial insemination, which is what we humans are doing with IVF treatments. Yet we fail to recognize that overcrowding in cities, for example, works the same way for humans. The evolutionary force within you senses overcrowding and a need to control population growth. What more effective and natural way to adapt in order to accomplish that survival tactic than by lowering fertility? There's too many of us, so the collective unconscious that lives within us all may decide "We won't make more."
Even on the purely physiological level, reproduction is an exquisitely fine-tuned process that can be thrown off easily. Reproduction involves not only the harmonious interplay of the entire endocrine system - a hormonal chain of command that sets off a complex chain of molecular signals on cue - but also the cooperation of two other body systems, the nervous system and the immune system. These three systems - endocrine (or hormone), nervous, and immune - are key to the reproductive process as well as to creating the prompts that allow your body to make the continual shifts it needs in order to survive in a changing world.
© 2007 , Raymond Chang, M.D. with Elena Oumano, Ph.D.
from What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Getting Pregnant: Boost Your Fertility with the Best of Traditional and Alternative Therapies, Warner Wellness, an imprint of Warner Books, Inc., 2007