Maybe she manifested it

or maybe she charged vulnerable fertility clients five figure sums

Circa 2014, a friend gave me her copy of The Secret.

She swore it had bought great things into her life and that maybe, it could bring a baby into mine.

Before gifting it to me, she suggested that I wrote what I really wanted and that I tuck it into a pocket in my wardrobe, considering this my message to the universe. I did. I wrote the name of my imagined girl and boy twins on a small piece of paper and placed it in the pocket of a coat I rarely wore.

We could perhaps look at my life today and correlate it to that moment. For a brief time, I was pregnant with twins. I don’t have twins now, I have one son, who was a twin, albeit for a very short time. The names were taken by friends and, I never did read The Secret. Did I manifest my child the day I tucked that note into my coat? Or did I simply have the resources I needed to continue with assisted conception and get very lucky? It’s a terrible rhetorical question as I feel very clear about the answer.

There’s probably little need here to delve into how we arrived at the current understanding of what is meant by manifesting, magnetising or the law of attraction. The premise is simple; the universe is listening - ask for what you want and magical things will happen.. you can draw in what you seek and believe in, if you believe in it hard enough. It’s alluring. It’s also wildly problematic.

If we consider manifesting at a pragmatic level, we can theorise that setting a clear vision or goal may well be powerful in particular contexts. If I build a very specific Pinterest board of a house I’d like to live in, there will no doubt be ripple effects in the way I seek my new house and the many steps I take to get there. If in five years time, I’m in a cottage by the sea with striking resemblance to my vision, do I get to pat my manifesting self on the back for doing a good job?

How we make sense of future trajectories is a unique and personal thing. We can argue though that privilege, finances, luck and confirmatory bias will all play their part. It’s not my intention here to dismiss ethereal things that people hold dear to their hearts. The mysteries in our lives, ‘signs’ from loved ones, the peculiar feeling of déjà vu, uncanny dreams - they aren’t being made fun of here.

What I do want to problematise is what happens when we cross the streams of ‘manifestation’ and infertility.

Because baby manifestation coaches are a real thing and their services do not come for free. (Note that I am not talking about fertility coaches here - I want to make that distinction very clear).

Indeed, the going rate to work with someone who will help to manifest you a baby can reach into five figure sums and often does. Methods, programmes, plans, masteries, transformations to bring your baby earthside are all out there for the expensive taking. While I am wholly cynical about baby manifestation as a way to build your income - it is particularly the charging of outrageous fees that I am calling out.

We are vulnerable. I recall reading that Nicole Kidman put her pregnancy down to swimming in the waters of Kununurra. Had it been in my means to get there and swim, I probably would have. There was a distortion to my logical, rational mind when it came to trying it all. I could know that buying a fertility talisman wasn’t going to be the thing to get me pregnant whilst buying it and placing it by my bed. My suspension of disbelief bought me pockets of unreliable hope, but hope nonetheless. It also made me wildly vulnerable, a verifiable cash cow in the wrong hands.

To be clear; if you’re reading this and Not Pregnant Yet…

it isn’t because you haven’t manifested it. It’s not because you have a baby blocking belief buried deep into your subconscious. It isn’t not happening because you don’t believe enough, that you aren’t manifesting properly, hard enough or with the right coach by your side to clarify and cleanse your vision. There isn’t a missing piece in the wiring between what your mind and body desire that someone else can solve in three monthly installments of three thousand pounds.

The truth is: this is fleecing people of money that could be spent on fertility treatment, on therapy or potentially driving someone into debt and it appalls me. That a pregnancy is included in the ‘success rates’ of a manifestation coach is nothing shy of grossly unethical.

Our vulnerability of suspension of disbelief isn’t part of this critique. It’s how the trying to conceive community are exploited in an unregulated landscape.