From the Albuquerque Journal, an article about infertility: When Your Heart Says Yes but Your Body Says No.

"'Don't get pregnant'... that has become a very common message that we tell young women starting at about age 8," says Katie Singer, the Santa Fe author of "The Garden of Fertility," a guide to charting fertility signals to prevent or achieve pregnancy naturally.

"And if someone gets pregnant before she's 21, or before she's got a career, fill in the blank, people often perceive pregnancy as a failure," says Singer. "That's in the culture now."

It sure is.

She cannot forget the despair that marked her five-year struggle. "I felt like a rock. ... Because my eggs were poor quality, I was poor quality, and that effect keeps rippling: Sex is just for making nonviable pregnancies. 'Blighted ovums,' they call them. A jillion names just to say, 'You've failed.' Every time you have that happen ... I felt like a failure. I wasn't a woman.

"I felt like I had done damage to myself. I grew up in the '60s. Every joint I ever smoked, every drink I ever had, the abortion. I was wrong, I was bad, I was lousy. ... You feel sucked dry. Even getting your baby, you feel sucked dry."

Her use of the phrase "sucked dry" to describe how she is feeling is interesting. It could be seen as a metaphor for her earlier abortion, which continues to cause her to feel emotionally drained and fragile, even though she now has another baby.