Top 5 Hollywood Celebrities Who Opened Up About Their Fertility Journey

IVF has gained so much popularity since the birth of Louis Brown and now is normalised by many celebrities which makes it easier on couples suffering from infertility to go ahead with their treatment options and not stop dreaming about a family. These 10 celebrities are highly influential and have certainly normalised how people look at infants born through Assisted Reproductive technology (ART).

The word infertile is no longer used to describe people who cannot conceive naturally. The so-called infertile patients according to the past are now referred to as sub-fertile patients. This is because most of the patients referred to as infertile have a high chance of creating a healthy happy and fertile offspring and this has been proven well by these fearless and confident human beings.

Doctors who help couples who face it difficult to conceive naturally are called Fertility specialists. They along with highly skilled technicians called Embryologists, fertilize the gametes of both male and female partners in an IVF laboratory, grow the embryos for three to five days under highly monitored conditions and finally implant the embryo/s inside the uterus of the female patient. A range of courses of different levels are available for both people with life science background and clinicians on reproductive medicine and infertility. The courses at Medline academics cover the theoretical aspects online and make you spend very little of your precious time on skill-based training that are conducted in their centre at Bangalore.

Michelle Obama

The former first lady Michelle Obama described her infertility journey in her popular book named “Becoming”. Suffering from a miscarriage she was shattered by her dream of having a family. ART and advancements in reproductive medicine has now helped her give birth to two beautiful daughters Malia and Sasha who are not just healthy but charmingly beautiful. Her struggles to bring her reproductive system to support her offspring has been poetically described in her book.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Bollywood diva, the desi girl did not conquer the world at no cost! She had to put her career ahead of her dream of having a family. Yet she completed her family having a kid with the help of a surrogate. The Jonas gave birth to a beautiful baby girl on 15th of January 2022 and named her Malti Marie Chopra Jonas. The Advancement in reproductive medicine has definitely improved lives of many women and let them live life a little longer before diving into the responsibilities of taking care of child. Priyanka Chopra is the biggest inspiration to people who want to do more than just be a mother to their children.

Courtney Cox

Looks like our beloved Monika did not just fight fertility issues on the iconic show F.R.I.E.N.D.S. but also in real life! Courtney faced several miscarriages before she discovered that her body was inhospitable to her husband’s sperms just like in the show with chandler’s sperms! Advancement in reproductive medicine has helped her give birth to a beautiful baby girl named Coco Arquette while she was still working for the show! Courtney cox is an inspiration to all mothers who work hard to make an impact. We will always be grateful to her for making us laugh through all her struggles.

Kim Kardashian

After struggling hard to conceive the first baby Kim faced secondary infertility due to many complications. She said “I had so many complications. I had this condition called placenta accreta. There were a couple little operations to fix all that, so that created a little hole in my uterus, which I think made it really tough to get pregnant again” she further spoke about the struggles adding “It was a long road. I would go to the fertility specialist in Beverly Hills every day at five in the morning to get tested to see if I was ovulating”. It is very evident from the pictures that all that struggle was worth the take!

Anne Hathaway

The effortlessly beautiful Anne Hathaway has been candid about her fertility struggles and encourages sub-fertile couples to not lose hope. On her Instagram handle she wrote “For everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love” posting her baby bump which received more 4 million likes and thousands of cheering comments.

Top 6 IVF references from Netflix

As infertility in human beings rises exponentially, fertility treatments have become an everyday talk. So much so that many mainstream media with millions of viewers include scenes related to IVF to get more people to watch their shows! It is encouraging to many infertile couples who are struggling to complete their families that their icons or the characters who they absolutely relate to go through the same problems they are facing in their lives. This again is evidence is that fertility specialists are a need now more than ever! Medline academics offers online and offline courses for clinicians and for people with life science background to start their journey in reproductive medicine, infertility and embryology with courses of various levels and top-quality training. Let us see how our favourite characters dealt with infertility!

Phoebe’s Talk With The Embryos

We all must agree that we all shed a tear or two while Phoebe from the show F.R.I.E.N.D.S tried so hard to give the best gift to her brother and his old wife which is being a surrogate to her brother’s kids or in her words being an oven to their buns! Although the whole 19-year-old brother marrying the old professor in her 50s situation was rib-ticklingly funny it is a big deal for older people to conceive a healthy baby and grow it for 9 months. Surrogates come in great hand for females with unhospitable uterus. Phoebe gave the greatest gift possible and made the biggest sacrifice giving away the triplets and there is no match for her emotional endurance.

Jake And Amy Try To Make A Baby

There cannot be a cuter couple Jake and Amy from Brooklyn nine nine! Be it the proposal at the heist till he decides to be a homemaker dad, Jake has always proved his innocent love towards Amy. When Amy struggles with pregnancy Jake says “I really wanted to start a family. You and me. So, you know, we can keep trying or look into IVF or adoption or if we want, we can forget about the whole thing. But if we’re together, I’m happy no matter what”. Again, Jake did not fail to prove that he is the cutest husband Amy could have ever found. This scene is so special for couples fighting infertility that they feel normal that infertility can affect couples as perfect Jake and Amy!

Sheldon And Amy And Their Idea Of Making A Baby On A Petri Dish

Sheldon sure does not know about his fertility status even though he tried “masturbating for money” at a sperm bank in the very first scene of the first episode of the iconic show – Big Bang Theory. He meets Amy, a girl from an online dating app filled up by Rajesh Kutrapali and Howard Wolowitz. Although neither Amy nor Sheldon seems to have any knowledge of courtship, they will want to have a baby of their own grown on a petri dish. It definitely did not fail to bring some giggles from the audience when Sheldon shares his thought on making a baby using IVF because he can create a baby with an IQ equivalent of Sheldon and Amy’s combined!

The Turner’s Struggle With IVF

Friends from college is a new romantic comedy that in detail shows how traumatic an IVF journey can be physically and emotionally. The Turner’s go through hell as they fight with their relationships while Cobie Smulders is injecting a million EpiPens with hormones ruining her physical beauty. As bad as infertility treatments are portrayed to be in this show, viewers going through this procedure relate more to the characters and thus makes it easier for them to go through the same experience without feeling like a cursed odd couple.

Rick And Morty: Giant Incest Space Baby

The best science fiction adult animation show ever created “Rick and Morty” also has an IVF reference! Rick, thinking the semen sample is of a horse from her daughter’s clinic uses his science to make a disaster which results in forming an incest fertilization which is shot off to space by the president and finally ignored calling it space’s problem which develops into a giant incest baby which helps Morty’s family from a robot in a later episode. Nothing more random and funny could ever happen in any other show!

The Painfully Funny “Private Life”

Private life is an incredibly relatable story for couples struggling with infertility. This not so young couple face plethora of humiliations from peers and from each other. Be it Richard getting his sperms aspirated from his testis to Rachel making a decision of getting a donor egg, the movie takes us through a roller coaster of emotions. The movie is left on a cliff hanger without knowing if the couple get pregnant or not maybe insinuating to its viewers that it is completely normal that people go through this experience and not find the happy ending of having a baby they always dreamt of.

Fertility specialists have been giving hopes to families struggling with fertility. We need more fertility specialists now more than ever! As the fertility rates of human beings drop drastically, science is catching up to help people complete their families. Start your journey of becoming an infertility specialist opting one of the online courses in reproductive medicine and embryology of various levels available for clinicians and people with life science background offered by medline academics.

The stubborn seed

Have you ever come across that one nasty grain or a pulse that is so hard to chew that it hurts your teeth? That grain must have not sprouted if you observe. Although your mom had kept all conditions same for all the grains, some stubborn grains don’t seem to sprout at all.Similarly, some stubborn embryos in an IVF lab don’t easily hatch even if all conditions required are fed to it.

But why should an embryo hatch? 

Just like how a seed must sprout for it to implant itself onto the soil to grown into a beautiful plant, an embryo must hatch out of its Zona Pellucida to implant itself onto the endometrium for it to gown into a cute baby! 

Here the seed is the embryo and the soil for it is the endometrium

So, what do we do with the embryos that are like the nasty hard grains that won’t sprout?

We break their wall!  

In this case the zona pellucida of the embryo

This process of weakening or breaking the zona pellucida of the embryo artificially to help the embryo hatch out its blastomeres and aid implantation after embryo transfer is called Assisted Hatching of the embryos.

Want to learn more ways to help the seed called embryo grow on the garden soil called the endometrium? Take up one of our courses on advanced embryology and reproductive medicine of various levels available for both clinicians and life science students.

ASSISTED HATCHING OF EMBRYOS

We all have eaten sprouts at some point in our lives. Have you come across that one nasty grain or a pulse that is so hard to chew that it hurts our teeth? That grain must have not sprouted if you observe. Although your mom kept all the conditions same for all the grains, some stubborn grains don’t seem to sprout or hatch.

Similarly, some stubborn embryos in an IVF lab don’t easily hatch even if all conditions required are fed to it.

Just like how a seed must sprout for it to implant itself onto the soil to grow into a plant, an embryo must hatch out of it Zona Pellucida to implant itself onto the endometrium for it to grow into a baby

Here the seed is the embryo and the soil for it is the endometrium 

So, what do we do with the embryos that are like the nasty hard grains that won’t sprout?

We break their wall or the Zona Pellucida in this case!

Want to learn more such interesting techniques used to improve fertility in humans? Enrol to our advanced embryology course and dive into the world of embryos.

THE SPERM MARATHON:

A famous quote from 3 idiots by none other than viru sahastrabuddhi famously known as Virus by his beloved students goes like- “life is a race!... If you don’t run fast… you will be like a broken anda”. Well guess what! It was a race even before life!  The race through the female reproductive tract is no less than a roman colosseum! And the gladiators you ask? They are the poor sperms. This ain’t any ordinary race! The poor sperm has got a million competitors! He’s got an army of enemies stopping him from uniting with the princess in the fallopian tube, of course… the oocyte! Afterall the princess wants her man to know her worth… just like in real life! Finally, she lets in one winner and blocks all the other competitors by cortical reaction. Afterall she’s a sweet woman who wants to be monogamous to her guy!... So, if you ever feel low in your life, remember that you once won a race with more than a million competitors!

Explore the glorious journey of a sperm through the female reproductive tract and learn how you can help the poor guy fight his battles by taking up our basic andrology course.