The Ovum Club: What Will the V Stand For?

Reflections on Joy, the Netflix Movie about the first successful IVF.

In the Netflix film Joy, which recounts the story of the first successful IVF, there’s a striking scene where a group of women—patients of Steptoe, John Edwards, and Jean Purdy—sing a song that is equal parts satirical and heartbreaking: “We’re barren, totally, totally barren / But do we care? / Yes, we care!” The moment brims with irony and defiance.

And then there was the name they chose for themselves: the “Ovum Club.”

After years of counseling, leading Fertile Heart support circles, and shaping what became the OVUM philosophy, hearing that word echoed by those early pioneers felt like a message reaching across the decades—a tap on the shoulder saying: Keep going. What you’re doing matters.

In my forties, I sat across from one fertility specialist after another, each delivering the same grim verdict: “Premature Ovarian Failure.” My body, I was told, was failing at the most fundamental thing a woman’s body is supposed to do.

At first, the diagnosis hit me like a boulder crashing into the center of my life. But what started as devastation evolved into a transformative pilgrimage—a journey I chronicled in my first book, Inconceivable. That journey not only redefined my understanding of my body but also reshaped my sense of self and ultimately led me to my life’s work.

Other women began reaching out, their stories reflecting my own in ways that were both deeply familiar and uniquely their own. Gradually, what had started as personal grief transformed into something shared—a space where women and couples could come together to name their pain and re-imagine what might be possible.

The Fertile Heart OVUM process (documented in The Fertile Female) wasn’t something I invented. It emerged over a decade of sitting in circles with women and couples, listening to their stories, and weaving together the threads of our collective experience. The name and the tools of the process didn’t come from a branding exercise; they came from the raw questions, the longings, and the courage of the people who showed up and let themselves be truly seen. OVUM: Orphan, Visionary, Ultimate Mother. three archetypal forces that revealed themselves in the alchemy of those gatherings.

In the three-way mirror of the OVUM, the Orphan reflects a disowned, parentless child within us. The Ultimate Mother is a voice that speaks to us through dreams and symbols, offering a roadmap to all our creations, be they children, books, or a more meaningful way to live. Finally, in the liminal space between the Orphan and the Ultimate Mother, we conceive the Visionary, the next yet unborn, more integrated,more aware version of ourselves; the grounded, mature adult able to choose a useful step in the direction of her desire.

Fifty years after the birth of Louise Brown, the first of the 12 million babies born through IVF, we’ve perfected the freezing and thawing of embryos and witnessed mother-daughter uterus transplants, yet the alchemy of creating life remains stubbornly out of our control. Even in the best of circumstances, with grade A embryos and state of the art clinics, life—messy, unpredictable, and profoundly human—refuses to be tamed by our tools and technologies. For all the advances, there is still so much we don’t know.

This isn’t an argument against ART. Over the years I’ve celebrated the arrival of many IVF-conceived babies, with mothers and fathers who followed this road to parenthood attentive to internal cues, protective of their overall level of health. I have also seen women, propelled by fears of childlessness, reach for the promise of a techno-shortcut as a way of tuning out the body’s call for attention. For them, a potentially useful tool became a self-punishing weapon.

I imagine the women in that first Ovum Club, much like the participants in the 700+ Fertile Heart circles I’ve facilitated, didn’t come together merely to lighten the burden of a singular crisis.

They gathered to reject its silence, to defy the stigma, shame, and powerlessness it imposed. To honor their legacy, let’s claim our power as more conscious co-creators—crafting lives of meaning and beauty as we continue walking to meet our children halfway. Let’s ensure that the narrative of delayed childbearing doesn’t define us by what we lack, but by a new way of seeing ourselves and living our lives. Let’s make sure the “V” in OVUM stands for Visionary, not Victim.