They say money can’t buy happiness, but evidently it can buy you motherhood.
Shortly after Libby blogged about Celine Dion’s latest pregnancy announcement, I commented about the mega-singing star’s sixth try at conceiving a child.
Dion and her husband, Rene Angelil have a 9-year-old son who was conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF). However, the couple wanted to add to their family, so for the past year, Dion has undergone a series of IVF attempts.
According to the songstress, the sixth time was the charm. After an arduous journey and multiple failed attempts, Dion is now pregnant with twins, and is due in November.
“I feel like I’ve been pregnant more than a year,” the 42-old year singer recently told the French-language Le Journal de Montreal. “I never gave up. But I can tell you that it was physically and emotionally exhausting.”
And don’t forget… very, very expensive.
As Libby noted in her blog, if you have money, parenthood can be yours for the taking.
Whatever your opinion on IVF, whether you agree with it or not, the procedure to fertilize an egg outside of the womb, and then have an embryo transferred back to the woman’s uterus, is not cheap. Each cycle costs roughly $12,000 to $17,000, with a possible total of at least $60,000 to achieve pregnancy given that it takes, on average, roughly three attempts to conceive.
Dion willingly shares that it took her six times to conceive her twins and that the process was taxing on her body and her soul.
“It’s stressful but I’m relaxing. I look at my little belly. I do almost nothing,” Dion told Le Journal de Montreal. “If you tell me I have to stay in bed, I will stay in bed until November, when the babies are born. To bring them into the world, there’s nothing more important than that. It’s incredible.”
Given her star status and bulging bank account, Dion had the luxury of traveling from her Florida home to New York for months of treatments with one of the world’s top IVF doctors. The singer also admits that she hired an acupuncture expert from Montreal to help center her and prepare her mind and body for the IVF treatments.
With all that she has gone through to conceive her unborn twins, you’d think the world would simply be happy for the Dion and her family. But, alas, this is America, home of free speech and more than a few cynics, which is why no one should be surprised that the Grammy-winner is now being targeted by wannabe parents who don’t have the same access to the tens of thousands of dollars that she does.
Some of those parents struggling to conceive children took umbrage with Dion’s recent comment:
“There are no accomplishments bigger than [being a mom]. The trophies and the money, that doesn’t give meaning to life and that doesn’t give you true happiness,” she says. “A baby–yes.”
While the cash may not “give meaning to life,” it is needed to pay for “a baby–yes.”
Dion is also being taken to task for announcing plans to kick off a new Las Vegas show next year, just months after her “miracle” babies are born. Then, there’s the fact that her husband is 68 years old and… well, you know the rest of that story.
So, can money really buy happiness?
If your happiness lies in giving birth to biological children, and the only way you can become a parent is through costly IVF treatments, then I guess the answer is pretty obvious: Money = baby = happiness.