Catholic Conversations with TCA: Leigh Snead: At Home

I’m Not Going to Adult Summer Camp, But I Get It

Leigh Snead — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:02:22 GMT

Tichnor Bros. Inc., Boston, Mass., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s that time of year again. Time to start planning summer travel, securing pool memberships, grabbing spots at your parish’s vacation Bible school, and signing the kids up for that highlight of a kid’s summer—camp.

As I start to plan summer 2026 for my own family, I can’t help but remember last summer’s articles about adult women going to old-school sleep-away camps – like the ones they went to as girls – just to make some new friends? I’ll confess, simply looking at the headlines stressed me out. How did they find childcare for the whole week? (OK, maybe the kids were at their own camps.) And, I wondered, who the heck has time for new friends? It’s hard enough scheduling a lunch or a coffee with the ones I already have.

But then I remembered a time when I didn’t feel like I had a lot of friends. I was in graduate school. In the two years since graduating from college I had married my husband, held three different jobs, and lived in three different cities. But now that we were back in DC to stay (at least for a while). I was looking—longing, maybe—for some friends.

Most of the other grad students in philosophy, while a friendly and welcoming, were overwhelmingly male and single. Not exactly what I (or my husband!!) was looking for in terms of study buddies.

But at the “Welcome Back” picnic the following year, I saw her. A girl! I introduced myself and tried to play it cool. This might be my only chance. I didn’t want to come off as some needy weirdo. Lucky for me, we often found ourselves in the same places between classes and almost always ended up chatting. I decided it was time to make my move.

In fact, I remember being pretty nervous the first time I asked her to lunch. My nerves quickly abated, however as she immediately said yes. Not only that, but she added that she’d been wanting to get to know me better, too. In our predominantly male cohort of brooding smokers, she and I stood out. Both of us were blonde – she tall and statuesque, me the opposite at five-foot nothing. I’d spied her reading Vogue in the graduate student lounge as she took a break from Husserl and Heidegger. She, for her part, admired the nonconformity I’d shown by eschewing the backpacks and messenger bags of our peers and opting instead to carry my books in a large designer handbag and take notes in bound leather journals. She was married, too, a newlywed. So, in addition to our study dates in cute cafes, our two-martini lunches, and our shoe parties, the four of us enjoyed many double dates. The cherry on top: they were also practicing Catholics.

When it became clear that pregnancy was not going to come easy (or at all) to me, they both understood. They were there for us. They understood what we, as Catholics with infertility, were going through. Their enthusiasm when we announced that we were pursuing adoption and when our new son arrived—well, it was extraordinary. A gift. She lavished my sweet baby with beautiful clothes and toys. She would stay with him at a moment’s notice if I had an appointment. They even opened their home to my infant son and me when our home was being painted and spruced up for sale and my husband was in Europe, and I needed to be in town for the preparatory baptismal classes our parish required.

While my family moved away and we eventually lost touch, her friendship was exactly what I needed during those years. I’ve thought of her gift of friendship often over the years, especially as I was writing my recently released book on infertility. I’m grateful I was blessed with the courage to “ask her out.”

Lately I have been trying to recapture a little of that boldness. Motherhood is often an excellent facilitator of friendship. That was certainly true for me with my first child. As a first-time mom with a baby, you find yourself around other moms with babies at library story times, mommy-and- me fitness classes, or anywhere that sells diapers. You smile, maybe your babies smile, too and you agree that both having babies is all you need to know and so you set up a playdate and maybe become friends.

Today, I’m no longer a new mom. With four kids spanning 17 years, that sort of easy acquaintance is tougher to come by. As the 50-year-old mom of a toddler, the likely candidates for our playdates are often the daughters and grandchildren of my already-friends! Even the natural community that a parish can offer can be elusive when the opportunity for the après-Mass chat is overridden by the sighs and eye rolls and grunts of teenagers who just want to go home already, or the squirmy toddler desperate for the toilet.

So, in an effort to work around these current awkward friendship logistics, I have done a few things. I recently messaged someone I don’t really know apart from an online local moms’ group we’re both in about a cool post she wrote on social media and included my phone number in case she might ever want to hang out IRL.

When I was in another city for a recent meeting, I made a point to schedule a breakfast with a woman I’d never spent time with in person but whose contributions to an online working group we’re both a part of never fail to impress me. I joined a Pilates studio where two friends I wish I was grabbing coffee with more often signed up, too. Even if it’s just a quick chat on the way to our cars after a class, it offers what we all crave: connection. Real connection with flesh and blood humans that reminds us that social media “likes” aren’t enough, and our cellphone is actually not our BFF.

I don’t know if I’m ready to head off to summer camp—or if I ever will be—but I get it. That deep longing for (IRL) connection and the importance of taking a chance on friendship.

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IVF and the Doctor-God Complex

Leigh Snead — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:28:55 GMT

Photo credits following article

“I’m creating life back there, not destroying it!” – the words could almost have come out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But, no, they were the words that our proudly professed “Cradle Catholic” doctor shouted at me and my husband while wildly gesturing to the back room of his Washington, D.C. clinic as we, once again, refused his entreaties to enroll in his in vitro fertilization (IVF) program. After a year of trying, and failing, to diagnose our infertility, my husband and I were shocked by this doctor’s – this alleged healer’s – hysterical display. We left his practice immediately and never returned.

It’s been more than twenty years since we fled that clinic, and IVF is everywhere today. It’s in the tabloids with stories of mixed-up embryos and celebrities becoming mothers at age 50. It’s the subject of playground gossip and Facebook groups. It’s now become a political issue and, with it, a new focus on the reduced fertility and the size of the American family. Whether it’s the strange techno-utopian pronatalism of Silicon Valley or that those who have large families themselves wish others to experience that particular joy, lots of people are encouraging Americans to have lots of babies.

Our current administration, whom some have dubbed the most pro-life administration ever, has even joined the chorus. President Trump has promised, as recently as his recent State of the Union Address, to make IVF more accessible by making it more affordable to everyone. One of his guests at the Address was a woman undergoing IVF treatments who can now afford the needed drugs through TrumpRX. (NB: She was not yet pregnant, and there was no indication as to how many cycles she may have already endured only to end up where she started.)

But is IVF pro-life?

Doubtless the desire to welcome and parent a child is a good one. It’s pro-life. And advances in medicine have made that desire easier to realize in the face of obstacles like disease or age. Contemporary understanding pits two courses of infertility treatment against one another.

The first, broadly referred to as Restorative Reproductive Medicine, is guided by the belief that a healthy woman should be able to conceive and bear a child, and that infertility is a symptom of disease. It seeks to optimize women’s health by balancing hormones, surgically removing physical barriers to conception like endometriosis, and fighting inflammation, among a host of other approaches. People, often Catholics, under the care of physicians who practice Restorative Reproductive medicine, intend to conceive naturally. This is pro-life.

And the second kind—Artificial Reproductive Technologies (ART), which includes IVF—not so much. They serve to circumvent the cause of the patients’ infertility. ART coaxes and manipulates gametes, and IVF in particular goes one or two steps further by either combining the gametes in a petri dish and allowing them to meet or forcibly injecting the sperm into the egg. These treatments separate the procreative from the unitive in the marital act and leave the underlying causes of infertility unknown and untreated.

There is also much more to IVF than simply finding ways to create and implant an embryo into the womb of a hope-filled woman. Many eggs are brought to maturity by a process called superovulation and then harvested. Oftentimes they are screened before the next step of fertilization when the sperm and egg combine to create a new and genetically distinct being. And this is where things start to get messy. It is not just one being that is created, it is many. And what happens to these human beings if they are not implanted? They’re either destroyed or permanently frozen or tampered with in God knows what ways. That’s a lot of things, but it’s not pro-life.

We should go further and look at companies like Orchid, who aren’t just targeting their embryo screening services to infertile couples. Orchid and other services like them promise to help you have the healthiest child with all the traits you desire for her or him—you can choose the sex, too! —and none of the ones you don’t. What’s skipped over in their seductive ads are the details of what happens to all the embryos who don’t make the cut or who are simply deemed “extra.”

Whatever else our “Cradle Catholic” Washington, D.C. doctor was doing decades ago at his clinic, his frustrated hysterical raving hardly stands up to scrutiny. And it shouldn’t have taken his outburst to shock us into our right minds. At the end of our very first meeting with him, he enthusiastically cheered, “Now let’s get you pregnant!” Instead of hiding my revulsion behind an awkward giggle, we should have started running. All we wanted was health care that would facilitate the creation of new life within me, my husband and I co-creators with God. Our doctor and all of those in the big-money business of IVF have crowned themselves the new creators of life, believing their own lie that the destruction of it is nothing to be worried about.

Leigh Fitzpatrick Snead’s recently released book, “Infertile but Fruitful: Finding Fulfillment When You Can’t Conceive” is available from Sophia Institute Press.

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Why I Wrote a Book on Infertility

Leigh Snead — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:56:29 GMT

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

As a Catholic woman who never succeeded in her quest to become pregnant, I find it extremely heartening to see all the attention being paid to Madeleine Kearns’ recent account in The Free Press of her personal journey to motherhood, and of the fertility medicine landscape those living in a season of infertility must navigate in order to get the care they need. That folks are moved by Madeleine’s story is good news for me in another way, too. I’ve just returned to full TCA duties after a year spent writing a book about my own infertility story. I hope you’ll want to read it.

My book, Infertile but Fruitful, out next year from Sophia Institute Press, tells the story of a Catholic couple—my husband and I— who married young and then spent two decades hoping, trying, and failing to achieve pregnancy. In it, I discuss how carrying the cross of infertility brings challenges to faith, marriage, and sense of self, but also how this particular cross can ultimately strengthen all of these and fortify a life that bears many holy fruits. Interspersed within the narrative are some tips for surviving a season (or lifetime!) of infertility, and reminders of what our Church teaches us about our sexuality, marriage, and the co-creation of tiny humans.

I was inspired to write this book by the many comments, DMs, and conversations that followed after I wrote a couple pieces on infertility, including an open letter to those suffering as I had. Recalling and writing down the account of the many ups and downs of my own story—with the scale and detail required of an actual book—was, as expected, emotional. However, the intensity of my emotions really did surprise me. It was like taking a time machine back to some of my darkest days. Often, while going over my pages at the end of a big writing day, I’d find myself weeping like I sometimes do while reading a really engrossing novel. But then it would dawn on me that this was actually a story about me and my struggle that I had written myself!

Writing a Book Requires Reliving the Hard Parts of Life

I was not tearing up because my prose was just soooo beautiful! Hardly. I, like many writers, can often find my own words, well, cringey. It brought me to tears because the intense pain of infertility – feeling betrayed by your own body in trying to realize your vocation and most desired dream – is like almost nothing else. But I would also sometimes cry tears of joy for the fruitfulness and blessing that was made possible by this struggle.

Infertility is sad and full of huge disappointments, but it is not so very uncommon. And yet, those of us who experience it often suffer and grieve in silence, isolation, and even shame. I knew I had put on a brave face for others, but I think I may have kept my true feelings a secret even from myself.

In putting pen to paper, I was finally able to feel those feelings in full. It also could be that, finally, my guard is down. I’ve just turned 50 and am no longer hoping for a pregnancy. I have four beautiful sons (through adoption), a loving husband, and a better life than I could have imagined.There’s no longer a need for the stiff upper lip or the dogged determination to pull myself up by the bootstraps and move on to the next cycle, next injections, or gird myself against the next disappointment.

Thank you, Madeleine (and thank you, Ashley and Kathryn) for keeping the conversation around infertility and fertility care going. Let’s keep talking about it and writing about it. Let’s bring it out of the shadows of secrecy and shame and despair and into the light—the light of God’s love.

Lastly, let us remember that not every couple’s infertility story ends with a baby. Even if they are under the care of a NaPro doctor (which is its own reward) or they discern a call to adoption, sometimes the baby never comes. These are the families—yes, families—who, again and again, need to be reminded that their suffering wasn’t for nothing, that they are a vital part of the Church, and that they are the beloved sons and daughters of God.

Love Bears Fruit

Leigh Snead — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 02:34:00 GMT

My husband Carter and I co-authored a piece in the current issue of Columbia, the monthly magazine of Knights of Columbus. We are always eager to share our family story of how we came to adopt four boys, and offer tips to couples who, like us, thought the children would naturally come, but didn’t.

We give tips for couples who are “living through the season, or maybe even a lifetime” of infertility. Click here to read the whole article, and feel free to share your comments below. We all have a story to tell, don’t we?

Carter and Leigh Snead greet Pope Francis.

Mother’s Day, Fruitful Femininity and Infertility

Leigh Snead — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 16:12:00 GMT

I once read a (secular) infertility blog, and in the inaugural post the author made a thoughtless joke, something like “I just flew back from maternity leave, and boy are my arms tired.”

Crickets.

Well, virtual crickets swiftly followed by an angry mob of infertile women descending upon the comm box. It won’t come as a surprise that the blog in question did not live beyond the first few (apologetic) posts.

See, the mistake the author made was thinking that because she had, at one time, trouble getting pregnant, it didn’t matter that she had ultimately been successful in her efforts and given birth to two (TWO!) healthy babies. ..

This article originally appeared in the National Catholic Register. To read the rest, click here: The National Catholic Register.

Leigh Fitzpatrick Snead is a fellow for The Catholic Association. She is a writer, editor, speaker and mother of four whose work engages questions of popular culture, motherhood, family, and the Church. Leigh lives with her husband, Carter, and four sons in Granger, Indiana.