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AFA Response to the Tyra Banks Show

by Gabrielle on January 21st, 2008

So, I was pretty upset by the Tyra Banks Show last week. But I wasn’t the only one. Melissa includes a link to Fertility Notes (thanks!) and several other blogs in her Thursday article for BlogHer entitled Wolves in Duck’s Clothing. And these are just a few of the posts that I have seen in response to the show. If you want to see some angry and mobilized women supporting each other, you should see visit some of the TTC (trying to conceive) and IF (infertility) message boards out there. Many have copied and shared their letters to the show on the boards. Whoa, Tyra. Look out.

I was also gratified to see the America Fertility Association (AFA)’s response to its members and to the show. Here it is in full:

As many of you know, The AFA makes every effort to assist the media when reports, stories and programs deal with infertility, reproductive difficulties, fertility preservation and protection. We were approached by the Tyra Banks Show senior producer who pitched one segment about women who pursue ART despite repeated let-downs and perhaps impossible odds. We sent a notice to you asking if you’d be interested in participating in that show. What we’ve subsequently learned is that the taping revealed another agenda entirely. We are furious. There is no excuse for that duplicitious solicitation. Below is the open letter we’ve sent to the Trya Banks senior producer.

Ms. Radecki,

The American Fertility Association is writing in response to the numerous calls, emails and blog links we’ve received about the Tyra Banks Show you’ve produced about “infertility.”

We gladly assisted you in your effort to recruit people who’ve stuck with Assisted Reproduction despite long-shot odds and the painful difficulties associated with compromised fertility for an installment of your show. Your detailed query asked for contact with women who could speak emotionally and articulately about their determination and their struggles (see below). It is your right to interview willing and informed participants as you see fit. Here we underscore informed. Your show is not a news show, but rather planned entertainment. Nowhere in that initial letter or in numerous subsequent conversations did you even hint that what you were intending was a set up for “spontaneous” interventions and the subsequent damaging conflagrations.

Let’s be clear. If you’d honestly put forth your mission, stating that the Tyra Banks Show was interested in emotional confrontations, people willing to defend to family, friends and the world their particular quest for biogenetic children, we’d have put out your solicitation to our membership just the same. We believe in the intelligent decision-making capacities of the people The American Fertility Association serves. However, it now appears you were running a bait-and-switch operation designed to exploit well-meaning and, apparently, the most vulnerable among this group of patients simply to re-create a by-now tired and trite TV rite of public humiliation. That is simply reprehensible.

It is unfortunate that the prism through which The Tyra Banks Show chose to view the delicate and complex subjects of reproductive difficulties and associated medical treatments yielded very little about those topics. Instead, we are told, the focus was on manufactured conflict and hysteria. You could just as well have targeted any other poorly understood condition or disease and produced the same segment.

We regret that we have exposed our membership to such tactics. Despite urging that you treat reproductive difficulties with sensitivity and thoughtfulness — even if that yielded tough grilling and a feisty give-and-take, you chose to tread the same histrionic ground that’s pretty well trampled by now.
The Staff of The American Fertility Association

Word.

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