Club Friday Q&A: DEI Expert Sarah Saska on Fertility in Pop Culture
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Courtesy of Nana aba Duncan
Remember that time when Love is Blind had that not-really live-streamed reunion show? Tech problems aside, one conversation from that night really caught my attention: the way co-host Vanessa Lachey questioned the former contestants about their fertility choices. In the year 2023?! Wild. But that insensitive approach to talking about people’s reproductive choices is still super common, says Sarah Saska, co-founder and CEO of DEI firm Feminuity. Read on for our chat about what exactly was wrong with Lachey’s questions, why it’s actually kind of weird to treat people’s fertility journeys like small talk and why we should be pushing back against these narratives, especially right now.
Tell me a little bit about your connection to pop culture and how that connects to your work.
When I was doing my PhD, I looked at why we're not bringing human frames—race, gender, sexuality; really just basic stuff—into the design or development of new technology. I was basically asking, why don't we consider elements like diversity in the design of anything? One of the case studies I did during my PhD was on Tesla. This is before Elon really went off with Twitter and the meltdown of the last few years; at the time, Tesla was deemed as hyper innovative, yet they were still using antiquated practices from the automotive industry, like using male-bodied crash test dummies as the default. So it's like, okay, you're innovative, but you're still inheriting all of these antiquated practices that are highly gendered, sizeist, ableist, so you're not really that much more progressive than the other automotive companies. This is a little bit before the tech boom, but my PhD looked at why you need diversity when you design any type of tech or innovation. That ultimately became a company that I run.
I know you have a lot of thoughts about how pop culture portrays fertility. Let’s start with the Love is Blind reunion back in April—what did you think when you heard Vanessa Lachey asking people when they were gonna have kids?
So my best best friend is an OB/GYN specializing in reproductive technology. She is Bangladeshi and lives in North Carolina, and I think she's the only racialized woman in her clinic. So, everything she tells me on a weekly basis that she's managing and navigating in this wild world [makes me think], unless you're an OB/GYN, it's just not your business. Like, Vanessa Lachey are you suddenly an OB/GYN? If not, mind your business. This is just nothing related to her conversation. And also, these folks are effectively strangers to her, so to ask them about something so deeply personal, on something that was supposed to be live-streamed? She knows that people are struggling with infertility and miscarriages, and that it's difficult to get pregnant, maintain a pregnancy and have a safe childbirth because she's had her own personal experience. So it just seemed wild to me.
Okay, stay with me, because I know this is a bit of a logical leap. But you know when you might be grieving something and people don't know what to say to you, which is so awkward, and then someone else loses a person or a pet or a relationship, and you still default to the same platitudes because you don't know what to say either? In some ways, I feel like fertility is similar; we are actually just so ill-equipped, in general, to deal with questions of fertility, especially since the way that our lives are structured makes it much harder. My first thought was also, “You've gone through this! Why aren't you doing better?” But then I started wondering if maybe we're all just bad at this.
I think that's really interesting frame, that maybe we all just suck at the grief component. That actually affords her so much more humaneness and empathy, so I do appreciate that frame. I definitely hadn't thought of it in that sense. I think there's a lot of merit to it though, because it's the same with death. It's the same in any big tough conversation.
It also strikes me she's probably not someone who's got more people around her to have these kind of nuanced conversations to help her unpack it. Her husband is a bit of a typical [bro], so [maybe] he wasn’t like, “Hey honey, let's navigate the complexity of what we just went through.” And if no one helps her unpack it, and then she doesn't know how to have that conversation properly, either, right?
Totally. I feel like we've done so much talking, especially over the past few years, about race and about power dynamics; we came off the #MeToo conversation, and then we went right into the Black Lives Matter conversation and the anti-Asian hate conversation and the colonialism and reconciliation conversation. So, it feels like we are talking about these things all the time. But when it comes time to actually implement them in our lives, we still are relying on some of these old narratives around what we should be doing.
And I feel like you need really good support people; you need good coaches, therapists, best friends and people who help you intercept those narratives too, right? All the logic in the world doesn't matter when at the end of the day, you spend time with your family and that intense, great aunt is like, “Hey, so when are you getting pregnant?” These narratives are just so, so strong, and they run across gender and age and culture. They're just so enmeshed. And, they're deeply tied to nostalgia and feeling a sense of home—all those really big, tough, heavy, emotional feelings we all live with.
Before we go on, maybe it makes sense to pause and really spell out the problem with that kind of question, whether it’s come from your great-aunt or Vanessa Lachey.
It assumes having kids is a straightforward decision. But when I listen to groups of friends actually having these conversations, there's just so much nuance involved. They’re thinking about having kids in this political climate, with climate change, social turmoil and political unrest, racial discrimination, acts of violence and lack of systemic support and literal human rights violations around abortion. All of these things are big ethical decisions at a fundamental level. It also assumes it's somehow easy to get pregnant, but there is a lot of complexity around infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, all those kinds of things.
I think Vanessa could have done it differently by just inserting two or three sentences before asking the question, and it could have changed the whole frame. But she asked it in such a casual way that didn't give a nod to the complex, political nature of these conversations. It would have gone a long way if she had even said, “Hey, I know it's really complicated. It's different for every person…” Just something really basic. But there wasn't any of that sort of preamble. So, I think right out of the gate, her nonchalance in the way she framed it just assumed biological children as the default choice.
She also had a lot of interracial couples on the stage, and she gave no nod to complexity beyond a wealthy white, heterosexual, non-disabled, cisgender woman's experience. I think a really simple example she could have even perhaps brought up is maternal death rates for Black women. Take the Serena Williams example. If Serena Williams wasn’t able to effectively advocate for her own bodily autonomy when she is arguably one of the most wealthy, resourced powerful Black women in this world then not to be disrespectful, but how can anyone with fewer resources going to have the sort of support that they need? Especially racialized women?
100%. But Love is Blind does not feel like the place for any of these conversations! That's maybe also why it's kind of wild—we act as if talking about people's fertility is just like a normal, casual thing but there's so much that goes into it. The other part is the ageism: “You're too old to have a baby.” Talk to me a little bit about how that conversation went.
This is maybe my own projections a little bit, but she just felt like that annoying aunt asking that question. And, it felt like there was a sense of urgency. It was like, “Okay, you're married. Okay, cool. Now, when are you getting pregnant?” It wasn't like, “Hey, might this be something you and your partner are considering in your journey?” It just felt like there was this inherent urgency in the way she framed it: you are married, therefore, this is the next logical step.
I felt for Brett and Tiffany because she was the oldest of the women on the show. And I remember thinking, this could be a triggering conversation, because she's the person that people are looking to the most, right? Especially since that couple represent this Black excellence narrative, or at least that's how the show is positioning them. So of course, they must have the first child.
Plus, thinking about kids and aging is genuinely stressful. My mom had my little brother at 38 and was classified as a geriatric pregnancy. I am currently 38 and single! I feel completely paralyzed about this part of my life—I have no idea what I'm going to do here. So it’s weird that none of that would show up in this conversation, and that there was no sensitivity to the fact that among Love is Blind’s viewership, there are probably people who are struggling with the same thing.
They could have easily just inserted some resources! And the other side of it is, the narrative in pop culture and elsewhere is always on the person with the uterus, but so much of the conversation really has to do with quality of semen. The narrative is like, Hugh Hefner having kids. There's lots of research that shows the quality of sperm depreciates by the decade, but we just don't have those conversations.
And Al Pacino and Robert De Niro! The fact that we’re not having that conversation does feel like such a missed opportunity. If you want to unpack it from a feminist lens, these expectations are unfair. All of the social, political and economic reasons why fertility can be a challenge for so many people is unfair. But that doesn’t change the fact that for many people, this is a huge issue that they are experiencing and we could probably all benefit from some honest conversations and nuanced conversations. Are there any pop culture representations of fertility that you thought were done well?
If you watched This Is Us, the character Kate goes through the whole fertility journey on that show. The character is 38, just had a miscarriage and also has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and in one episode, the doctor says to her, “You are not a candidate for IVF, because you are overweight.” I thought that was interesting, because at least it's showing what's really happening in the medical industrial complex. Because that's still a thing—people are still being told if they can’t get pregnant, they should lose weight.
In general, what do you think of pop culture representations of fertility?
There's generally not a lot of nuance, right? We've all heard and seen examples where a character has an abortion or a miscarriage, and critics have been like, “Hey, they did a good job, because they didn't make a big deal of it.” The character has an abortion, it’s a Tuesday and then they move forward. Which is better than previous examples where someone has an abortion and is suicidal for three years and never recovers. But I just feel like writers don't know how to deal with it.
I do think Chrissy Teigen has been interesting. After Roe vs. Wade was overturned, she posted a reflection on her miscarriage and said actually, what she had was an abortion. I thought that was a fascinating moment, because I think that's probably true for a lot of folks—they didn't frame whatever experience they went through in a particular term, and then once they do, there's a lot more power to it. You realize, actually, damn, I really do care about abortion rights.
Speaking of abortion rights and reproductive justice, we're seeing very real-life infringements on bodily autonomy, and not just in the States—a lot of that rhetoric is happening here as well. Why do you think it's important to push back against these very old-fashioned narratives around pregnancy and fertility in the context of what's happening politically?
Because we need to actually name the inequity. Who will this affect the most? Indigenous people are definitely being impacted by some of these narratives, as are racialized people, low-income people, people with less access to medical support and care, less access to knowledge. It's always the folks that have the least who get the hit the hardest in these conversations, and then become the least safe. Affluence means you can, you know, fly your way to a different state, a different country and get what you need done.
There are also repercussions to these very narrow ideas of who gets pregnant, how to get pregnant. Even in a workplace, if you look at benefits, they are still really geared towards a very particular model: a white woman, non-disabled. As a company, we just went through the process of getting a new benefits package and I had to fight tooth and nail to find anything that actually had true support for IVF, true support for non-binary folks. These things don’t even exist in the benefits and insurance conversation. So it's like, if we don't see it in the media, it's not a thing. And then we don't have the policies, procedures, benefits packages—the support on the other end.
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