From Heroin to IVF: A Healthland Contributor’s ‘Needle Exchange’

  • Share
  • Read Later
CSA Images/Mod Art Collection via Getty Images

“The last time I gave myself an injection, the needle held heroin,” writes Healthland’s Maia Szalavitz in an honest, insightful essay that appears on the new addiction and recovery-themed site The Fix. Twenty-two years after kicking a heroin and cocaine addiction, Szalavitz is now going through IVF treatment to become a mother for the first time.

She writes:

It’s true that my yearning for a child can feel like an addictive craving — it has certainly driven me to this elaborate medical technology. Still I believe that the reproductive drive itself is the raison d’etre for the machinery of desire that goes awry in addiction. If we weren’t able to persist despite overwhelming negative consequences — the essence of addiction — no one would ever have a second child.

You can read Szalavitz’s entire piece here.