As a Black woman, I never thought I'd have fertility issues. When I was struggling to get pregnant, I realized I needed to speak about my experience to help others like me.

• Regina Townsend is the founder of The Broken Brown Egg.
• She's become an advocate for more representation in conversations around fertility.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Regina Townsend. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When I realized that my husband and I were dealing with infertility, I felt lied to.

As a Black woman raised in America, I got specific messaging: that I was hypersexual and hyper-fertile; that the issue with Black people wasn't that we couldn't have babies, but that we had too many, too irresponsibly.

So even when I had heavy, long periods, sometimes for months on end, I didn't think about fertility. I figured getting pregnant would solve the period issue. Instead, I spent the next 13 years navigating infertility and assisted reproduction. Along the way, I found myself becoming an advocate for families of color, particularly Black families, who were in a similar position.

I started a blog to share my thoughts, and it took off

I'm a librarian and I love words. I started The Broken Brown Egg to share my own experiences and get my thoughts straight. To my surprise, the blog grew and grew. Women of color who had trouble getting pregnant thanked me for creating a space for them.

Infertility hurts everyone. But for Black women, it's traumatic in a different way. Studies suggest that Black women are up to twice as likely as white women to experience infertility. Yet we're less likely to get access to help creating our families. IVF and assisted reproduction continue to be seen as the realm of affluent white people.

Black women face more barriers to assisted reproduction

There are more barriers to seeking reproductive assistance as a person of color.

Black people are less likely to have insurance, let alone insurance that covers reproductive assistance. Women trying to conceive are often told to lose weight, which is particularly problematic for Black women, given the racist history of the BMI scale. It's even more troublesome for women who might live in a food desert.

I live in Chicago and there are no fertility clinics in predominantly Black areas of the city. Instead, I need to travel an hour or two by public transit to get to my appointments. I have to wonder if I am safe or welcome in those neighborhoods.

The worry doesn't stop there. When I got pregnant with my son, who was born in 2016, I had to confront the fact that Black women are nearly three times more likely than white women to die during childbirth, and Black babies are twice as likely to die. If we both survived birth, I had to worry about raising a Black boy in this country.

My AHA moment

When I first started The Broken Brown Egg, we hosted a gala to raise money and, more importantly, awareness. We called it the AHA gala, which stands for awareness, hope, and activism.

The gala was a hit, but for the next 13 years, my focus was on building my family. After my son was born, I battled postpartum depression — another thing that's not talked about nearly enough. Although I have my son, I'm still very much in the thick of living with infertility: We have embryos remaining, but we haven't made a final decision about what to do with them.

Infertility is about so much more than babies: For people of color, it's about confronting generations of trauma and disenfranchisement. It's about restoring our power to decide whether to have babies, when to have them, and with whom. The most beautiful thing that someone can do for you is make you feel seen.

Follow Regina and The Broken Brown Egg on Instagram.