By William Schroeder, LPC and clinically reviewed by Teri Schroeder, LCSW
IVF grief doesn’t get talked about much. People usually describe IVF as a medical process with a hopeful ending: shots, retrieval, transfer, baby. What gets left out is how much loss can be a part of it, even when it works.
If you’re in the middle of treatment and you feel sad, angry, jealous, or numb, that makes sense. None of it means you’re doing IVF wrong or that you’re ungrateful for the chance to try.
What IVF Grief Can Look Like
Grief during IVF rarely shows up as one big moment. It tends to come in pieces:
- Learning that getting pregnant without help probably isn’t going to happen.
- A canceled cycle, or a retrieval with fewer eggs than you hoped for.
- Embryos that don’t make it to transfer.
- A negative test after the two-week wait.
- A pregnancy loss, including an early one that people sometimes brush off as “just a chemical.”
- The picture you had of how becoming a parent would go.
Most of these losses are invisible to everyone else. There’s no service for an embryo that stopped growing, and few people know to ask how you’re doing after a failed transfer. That’s part of what makes this grief so isolating. Grief researchers call it disenfranchised grief: a loss that is very real to you but isn’t recognized by the people around you.
Why Pregnancy Announcements Hit So Hard
For a lot of people in treatment, the hardest moments aren’t at the clinic. They’re at a baby shower, or scrolling past an ultrasound photo, or hearing a coworker say “we weren’t even trying.”
Feeling a jolt of envy in those moments doesn’t make you a bad friend. You can be happy for someone and still hurt for yourself. Trying to force yourself to feel only the “right” feeling usually makes the hurt louder, not quieter.
Some people also carry shame about needing IVF at all, especially women, who often get the most pressure about having children. If that’s you, it’s worth saying plainly: infertility is a medical condition. It is not a verdict on your body or your worth.
When You and Your Partner Grieve Differently
Couples going through IVF often notice they aren’t grieving on the same schedule. One partner wants to talk through every result. The other goes quiet or throws themselves into logistics. And the partner getting the injections and procedures is carrying a physical load the other one isn’t.
A different style doesn’t mean one of you cares less. It helps to say out loud what you each need after a hard appointment, even if the answer is “I need a night off from talking about this.” If the strain is turning into distance or the same fight over and over, couples counseling can give you a place to work through it together.
Ways to Cope With IVF Grief
Nothing makes IVF painless, but a few things can make it more manageable:
- Plan around the hard dates. Test days and transfer days are loaded. Decide ahead of time who you want with you and how you want to hear the result.
- Decide who knows. You don’t owe anyone updates. Some people keep one or two friends in the loop and tell everyone else, “We’ll share news if we have any.”
- Give yourself permission to skip things. Muting a few accounts or leaving a baby shower early is taking care of yourself, not being rude.
- Have a line ready. A short answer to “So when are you two having kids?” saves you from improvising when you’re caught off guard.
- Keep something in your life that isn’t IVF. A walk, a hobby, a standing dinner with friends. Treatment will take over everything if you let it.
- Let yourself grieve each loss. Jumping straight into the next cycle without acknowledging the last one tends to catch up with you later.
It also helps to hear from people who have been there. RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association runs free peer-led support groups, both in person and online.
When to Talk to a Therapist
It might be time to get support if you’re having trouble sleeping or focusing, if you dread work because of who might announce a pregnancy next, if you and your partner keep having the same argument, or if you feel hopeless most days. Anxiety and depression are common during fertility treatment, and both are treatable.
At Just Mind, our perinatal therapists work with people going through infertility, IVF, and pregnancy loss, and we offer grief counseling for the kinds of losses other people might not see. You don’t have to wait until things fall apart to reach out.
If you’re in the thick of it right now, try to be as patient with yourself as you would be with a friend going through the same thing.
