Finally! A smart article about stress and infertility.

Has an ignorant friend, coworker or mother has ever offered you this seemingly innocuous fertility advice: “relax”?

Now, instead of wasting calories with a spoken response, you can pass on this article.

One of the author’s many good points is that stress is a too-convenient explanation for a mostly inexplicable–and therefore scary–problem:

Infertility, like autism, remains one of modern medicine’s greatest mysteries. Fertility doctors know why a 45-year-old woman can’t get pregnant, but they don’t know what’s wrong with up to one-third of their patients who are struggling to conceive—causing them to diagnose them with “unexplained fertility.” As a society, we wonder if we’re suffering from lurking environmental toxins or secret sexually transmitted diseases. But stress is an easy explanation.

People always try to find reasons why you’re suffering and they’re not. This isn’t necessarily because they’re bad. Randomness is scary, and most of them simply want to believe that they have earned their health or good fortune. For better or worse, that’s rarely the case.