Elizabeth Day Tried Everything to Get Pregnant. After 12 Years, She Stopped — and Found Meaning in Failure (Exclusive)
After 12 years of trying to get pregnant, Elizabeth Day decided it was time to stop — and what she realized next was unexpected.
The 46-year-old British podcaster and novelist, who hosts the podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, says she always knew she wanted to have kids. Growing up in a heteronormative family with two sisters and two parents, Day believed she was going to be a mother from the very beginning.
"I don't think I ever questioned the fact that I would have children," she tells PEOPLE.
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Day, who grew up attending an all-girls school, explains that she went on birth control when she became sexually active and was on the pill for 14 years before she stopped taking it after getting married to her first husband.
"I thought, because there is this idea that if you come off the pill, there's this sort of fertility boost sometimes and you can get pregnant at the drop of a hat," Day says. "And so I thought that might happen, but actually it didn't happen at all. And that's when I started exploring whether there was something awry."
Day spent two years trying to get pregnant with her ex-husband before she decided to see a doctor, a time period which she calls a "very lonely experience." Ultimately, she was told she had "unexplained infertility."
"[It's] a deeply unhelpful diagnosis because there's no explanation, so no one's quite sure how to treat it, so they just throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks," she explains.
The doctors also told her she had a bicornuate uterus which, according to The Cleveland Clinic, is an irregularly shaped uterus that appears to be heart-shaped and can often cause complications with pregnancy.
However, throughout all her meetings and appointments with "almost exclusively male clinicians," Day just kept feeling frustrated. She shares that she began to realize that women's medicine is "under-explored, underfunded and under-researched."
"So very often when I asked for an explanation, I was told that I was the one who was failing," Day says. "So the language of infertility is very much the language of failure, which is partly why I'm so interested in exploring failure through my podcast is because of these experiences."
"It puts the onus on women, and it is very often women who feel that — particularly if you are a kind of type A perfectionist, which I think I was — and you are used to putting in the work and hopefully getting the results, this is something that you cannot possibly control by being quote unquote, 'a good girl.' And I found that really difficult on top of all of the hormones."
She was then advised to try in vitro fertilization (IVF), which she started during the beginning of 2014. After two rounds of IVF, Day was again unsuccessful in getting pregnant after transferring an embryo.
"And again, there was no explanation for that. So I turned the sense of failure inwards, and it was actually talking to a friend of mine that really helped me kind of recategorize that experience," she explains. "And I told her I was failing to respond to the drugs, and she said, 'Maybe you're not failing to respond to the drugs. Maybe they're failing you.'"
Describing that chat as a "lightbulb moment," Day says reframing the way she thought about failure changed how she saw the experience of fertility medicine. She took a break from IVF and ended up getting pregnant naturally, but had the first of three miscarriages at the end of the year in 2014.
"2014 was a really intense year, partly because as anyone who has done fertility treatment will know, it's like having another job," Day explains. "There are so many scans that you have to go to. There's so many drugs that you have to take. There's so much measuring and prodding that happens and you are constantly living with this state of ambivalence and ambiguity because it might work, but it might not. And you need to carry both ideas."
She explains that even getting something like a positive pregnancy test, which is often a very happy thing for couples, carries weight to it when you're going through miscarriages and fertility treatments.
"There's this really difficult tension between all of your feelings because on the one side, you know you should feel uncomplicatedly ecstatic," Day says. "But on the other side, you know how fragile it can be. And if you've had a miscarriage, it robs you of any experience of a relaxed pregnancy."
"Now that I've had three miscarriages, I also understand that it's a very nuanced type of grief because you are grieving an absence, but you are also grieving the dreams you had of a presence," she continues. "And that's a really hard thing to cope with."
After a tough year, Day divorced from her first husband in 2015. She went on to freeze her eggs and unfortunately did not retrieve that many since she again was told she "failed to respond to drugs properly."
When she was about to turn 40, Day met her now-husband on Hinge. She thought there wasn't much hope at getting pregnant since she was now older and her husband was 44, but she did end up getting pregnant naturally just after her 41st birthday. When that pregnancy also ended in miscarriage, Day says it showed herself and her partner how much they really wanted to have a baby.
The two embarked on their own fertility journey, which ended with trying egg donation. Day explains that she felt like she was at an age where she would prefer to have a healthy egg that produces a viable embryo, rather than try using her own eggs. After a year of finding a donor and adjusting her lifestyle, she traveled to Los Angeles just after Christmas in 2022 for the embryo transfer. And it did not take.
"Again, you are pitched into this devastating realization that there is no explanation that even when you do everything you are meant to do, sometimes it just doesn't happen," Day says. "And that was one of the lowest points of my life."
"Looking back, that's over two years ago now, and I could never have imagined that I would be here, which is fully at peace with a life without biological children," she shares. "And the reason I am at peace with it, I had to confront some dark things. I had to ask myself some honest questions. But ultimately, it came down to the idea that maybe it's not my path in this lifetime to be a mother in the conventional sense."
Day notes that she's lucky enough to have three step kids, two nieces and 13 godchildren. "I'm very blessed in that respect, and I'm very aware that there are so many different ways to show up in a parenting role in this world," she adds.
She goes on to say that although the entire infertility journey is a very difficult one, she has learned something meaningful about herself, about love and about life. "It's my firm belief that actually going through the fertility struggles is an act of parenting," Day says.
"That's what you're doing. You are parenting your child, you are living your life for your children, giving them existence," she continues. "And that's an extraordinary thing that you are doing, and you are so strong to be doing it."
Day explains that while she was in the thick of trying to get pregnant, the thought of giving up was one she couldn't comprehend.
"I thought [not having children] would mean my life wouldn't have meaning that I would be left behind and that I would feel something so fundamentally lacking," she shares. "I promise you that there is so much peace and fulfillment on the other side of it and so many opportunities to create meaning."
"I think ultimately for me, part of my journey has been realizing how much I need to parent myself. And I think that's a struggle that many of us have," Day says "And so actually part of my parenting now is understanding what I need and that it's not a failure to meet those needs. And nor is it selfish. It's actually a really necessary part of being human."
The podcaster goes on to explain that she's found meaning and a real sense of community by doing her podcast, which explores this topic of failure.
"So I just want to say that to the person who is walking that path right now, there will be a way that you can find meaning again if it's not conventional parenting, and if it is and you do end up with a baby in your arms, I'm so so happy for you, and that is your path," Day says.
"And I realize now that it's not mine."
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