Latinas, fertility care and embracing ancestral holistic medicine

By Alex Zaragoza

Oct. 10, 2024 12:35 PM PT

Periodically, the Latinx Files will feature a guest writer. This week, we’ve asked De Los contributing columnist Alex Zaragoza to fill in. If you have not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, you can do so here.

I was sitting in a glowing hot pink room lined with white leather thrones. On each seat was a hole topped with a toilet seat. I sat on one, bare as a plucked chicken, and felt a gentle fog from a heated pot of herbs as my nether regions were being steamed like a pork dumpling.

How I got here is a path many women take, though not necessarily with a similarly damp destination. A month earlier I had a miscarriage; my second one. I’m now diagnosed with “recurrent miscarriage.” The one positive side effect to having more than one miscarriage is that doctors now take me more seriously, and test me for possible issues causing my miscarriages. Or so I thought.

When I underwent egg freezing last year, my doctor made me feel like I was carrying a uterus full of raisins that have been left inside a Datsun for 75 years. The best way to guarantee a pregnancy, she said, was through a physically invasive and extremely costly in vitro fertilization process that I’d most likely have to do multiple times since she was only able to retrieve two eggs during the freezing process.

Something felt wrong, considering I’d never actually tried to get pregnant. Throughout the process of egg freezing, I was spoken down to, not provided any options or clear explanation of what was happening to my body and often felt like a mistreated farm animal. Pumped full of hormones, then dumped on the curb.

This led me to start exploring holistic treatments: acupuncture, fertility-boosting diets and supplements by the fistful. I take eight capsules a day of one supplement.

Later, I started seeing an OB-GYN covered by insurance to help my fertility journey. When I had my second miscarriage, I went for a follow-up to ask about testing options as recommended by my primary care doctor. What followed was 45 minutes of scolding, constant interrupting and dismissing of my experience, going so far as to tell me, “Well, I’ve had nine miscarriages.”

Everyone in Los Angeles, she said, is going to tell me that some massage or acupuncture will get me a baby. “It won’t. Just go to who will get it done,” she declared, referring to IVF. My hopes of becoming a mom diminished.

It was a barrage of disrespect that left me sobbing from anger. Why does a doctor practice a specialty where patients are especially vulnerable. It’s known that fertility doctors can be cold, dismissive and will push the more expensive option of IVF on patients.

The continued mistreatment drove me further away from standard Western healthcare. I went deeper into interventions rooted in Indigenous practices to get pregnant.

In a qualitative study of fertility patients, women complained of insensitivity, depersonalization and misinformation from their doctors, and suspected they were more concerned with profit.

According to a 2023 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five women reported experiencing mistreatment during their most recent pregnancy, including being scolded or shouted at, no response to requests for help, threats to withhold treatment and feeling forced to take unwanted treatments. Of the 2,400 surveyed, Black and Hispanic women reported the highest percentages of such abuse — 30% and 29%, respectively.

Studies show that women’s pain is routinely dismissed by doctors, in particular that of women of color. One 2022 study by the independent health policy research organization KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, not associated with Kaiser Permanente) found that among women 18-64 who have seen a healthcare provider in the past two years, 29% experienced a doctor dismissing their concerns and 15% were told they were lying. This is a problem for many reasons, with the most obvious being the high threat of misdiagnosis and medical mistakes that lead to death. Black and Latinx women are the most affected.

“The biggest thing that I hear people say is that they weren’t given enough time to fully understand … what the test results mean for them,” said Jessica Diggs, an L.A.-based midwife. “But we’re also seeing over-medicalization in fertility in general. The more they can sell you on a service, this thing that will give you that promised child, they’ll capitalize on it.”

Maria-Cecilia Toro de Guertin was 36 and recently married when she and her husband decided they wanted a baby. “I started having a lot of my cycles being completely irregular and nobody could figure it out,” she said. “I saw six OB-GYNs in the course of three months.”

Eventually, she started experiencing serious pain. Regular medicine wasn’t working, she said, so she went to a fertility specialist, who told her the few eggs she had were “not good quality” and he doesn’t “do magic.”

“I was really upset,” Toro de Guertin said. “I was like, who does he think he is?”

That experience led to alternative treatments, “arming” herself with healers, including sobadoras who performed and taught her womb massage — an Indigenous medical practice to address blood flow and uterine alignment that can inhibit conception.

“I felt comfortable because it’s not invasive,” she said, also noting that it made her feel more connected to her body, spirit and ancestral lineage and the healers treated her with compassion. Within a few months, her levels improved, her period became regular and she felt healthier. At 45, Toro de Guertin now has twin daughters.

The trauma that can come with a physically and emotionally draining fertility journey sends people to seek that ancestral knowledge and an empathetic experience.

In 2021, Luz (she prefers a pseudonym to prevent issues with work) was about to turn 39 when she and her partner conceived shortly into their journey. “I thought I was so lucky,” she said. Then, at her eight-week checkup, doctors could not detect a heartbeat in the fetus. But her body wasn’t miscarrying the pregnancy on its own. She had to take an abortion pill.

“It was a very difficult space to navigate as someone who is fully pro-choice,” Luz said. “The last thing I wanted ... an abortion.”

Luz and her partner eventually decided to try IVF. Three of their eggs turned into viable embryos. But disappointment again followed when two of those embryo transfers didn’t lead to a pregnancy. “I felt like my body was working against me,” she said. “I felt like my worst fear was coming true that I would not be able to have a child with the person I loved. I needed support.”

Luz saw an OB-GYN at UCLA, a Latina doctor who she thought would treat her with more cultural understanding and compassion. Instead, the doctor, she said, was “cold and callous” and made her feel “stupid.” The fertility center where she underwent IVF treatments made her feel “like a number” and “in it for the cash.”

Luz is no stranger to the woo-woo stuff many millennial Latinas partake in — limpias, sweat lodges, mushrooms, etc. She hadn’t turned to holistic interventions for fertility yet because she “naively thought it was going to be easier” to get pregnant and “didn’t have any medical reason or warning” that conceiving would be a struggle. But she turned to Long Beach-based healer Pānquetzani for womb massages and other treatments, and also started seeing an acupuncturist.

“I feel like Western medicine tends to be solely focused on the body, almost as a machine,” she explains. “Holistic medicine looks at the whole picture and works on our emotional and spiritual selves.”

For those reasons, Pānquetzani — an herbalist, healer and birthkeeper, a caregiver similar to a doula — founded Indigemama: Ancestral Healing in 2012. “I like to give my clients a restorative experience to everything they’ve experienced under institutionalized medical care,” she told me.

She has personally experienced the traumas of that care. Once, while she was having a Pap smear, the doctor was called away in the middle of the procedure and left her in the room for 20 minutes with the speculum hanging from her vagina. Eventually the doctor returned and removed it. “There was no apology. No explanation. They clearly had forgotten me and left me there,” she said.

Raised by healers, Pānquetzani echoes Luz in saying the holistic healing she practices looks at the whole, not separating body from mind or spirit. While many disregard her work and that of other healers as old wives’ remedies, she sees them as part of her Mexican upbringing.

“This is the false notion that Western medicine is superior than any other types of treatments available,” Pānquetzani said. “They don’t understand the spirit behind the work. I would ask that doctor, ‘Have you received this type of care?’ If they did have any experience with it, they wouldn’t be so dismissive.”

Both Luz and Toro de Guertin said their doctors disregarded holistic medicine, even though neither had plans to replace their IVF treatments completely. Luz described an “arrogance” from doctors, a sense that “they have to be right or their whole practice comes into question.”

Of course, not all Western fertility doctors turn their nose up at holistic medicine or behave this way. Many encourage a mix of both Western and holistic medicine, as do holistic practitioners. But it shouldn’t be so hard to find medical care at an accessible price that allows space for both.

And regardless of what you go with, it’s expensive, ranging from a few hundred dollars into the tens of thousands. Both can also leave you vulnerable to throwing money at treatments that promise the world. Alex Sujong Laughlin, writing on the Defector blog, looked at how hormone anxiety (in particular regarding cortisol levels) has created a hot influencer market offering supplements, exercise plans, drinks and more that will allegedly cure just about anything, including infertility.

My Instagram and TikTok algorithms are proof that if you Google “fertility treatments” once, you will be flooded with thousands of products and treatments that assure you they’ll give you the baby you want.

Good healthcare shouldn’t cost the world, and it certainly shouldn’t come at the price of basic compassion.

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