What If I Could Never Have Kids?

Reeya Shah

The first time I was told I may never be able to have kids, I was 13. It’s a bit young to be thinking about having any, but surprisingly it was an unexpectedly monumental moment for me. I can’t remember exactly how my pediatrician told me…had she been flippant? Kind? Reassuring or absolute? I guess it didn’t matter, because I was 13 and all I remember was the feeling of a door closing. 

I’d started puberty earlier than most of my friends, having had my first period around the age of 10, and at first it was very dependable. Every month, no worries about it. But after the first year things got less predictable, and the combination of these missed periods and my more-than-normal hair growth led my pediatrician to begin the screening process to diagnose me with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS for short). I was lucky, in a way. So many women with PCOS go undiagnosed. I was lucky enough to have a doctor who recognized the signs. And yet, in some ways, being diagnosed so early was difficult; unlike generations before, I had access to Google.

The internet agreed with my doctor — if you have PCOS, if you don’t get periods naturally, you probably can’t have kids. I learned about what miscarriages were, how much pregnancy affects the body, and I thought “if pregnancy is so extreme and painful for normal people, won’t it be worse for me?” 

Looking back, I don’t know if I actually processed the sadness that came with that information. Teenagers have a remarkable ability to make decisions without thinking about why they’re making them, and I decided then that if I probably couldn’t have kids, I didn’t want them. I spent the next 7 years telling anyone who asked that I planned to become someone with a career, something that would take up all my time and keep me busy, and that I simply wouldn’t have time for kids. That I really wanted to be an aunt one day, but not a mother, even though I was always the first to get excited to babysit or play with kids. I became attached to the idea of working to improve the foster care system (How? No clue, I was 13 and believed the world would change by my saying so) because it made no sense to have kids when there were kids who needed homes already. 

I am endlessly grateful for having had a doctor who diagnosed me early, because I was able to grow up with an understanding of the things that made me different at a time in my life where differences weren’t celebrated. It was awkward being the only sixth grader who had enough hair to get threaded, or being the freshman in high school who had to wear long pants at PE to protect herself from sun damage after my first time going through laser hair removal treatment. Knowing why, and being able to study the cause, gave me understanding of myself and was the spark that ignited my interest in biology and women’s health, which I still have today. 

And yet, now that I’m older, I feel sadness for the younger me who gave up on a future because she thought it was impossible. I regret having had that much information available to me. Because I had made that decision about myself so young, it became a part of me that was ingrained to the point of influencing my choice of career path, my prospective romantic life, and my understanding of myself. In college I ran full speed at a career in medicine, so certain that I wouldn’t have to worry about balancing a difficult job with a family. And when I began to question my belief that I didn’t want kids, it changed the way I viewed so much of my life. 

I am not that much older or wiser, but I am no longer so certain, and I know more now than I did then. Now I’m closer to the stage in life where thinking about my future family makes more sense, and I can do so with more nuance. Now I know that women with PCOS can have kids, and that the door was never really closed to me. Though it may be a different journey than other women, it’s far from the impossibility I once imagined it would be. 

Reeya Shah is a recent grad figuring out where to go next. She's been involved with PCOS research for the last 5 years, and has a keen interest in understanding how our health experiences and our identities intersect and affect one another.