Why I am thankful for porn

Got your attention, did I? This Thanksgiving instead of the traditional gratefulness for my awesome husband, family, and friends, and many, many other blessings, I have decided to pay homage to nudie pictures.

Here's why (an excerpt from my soon-to-be-available book The Inadequate Conception):

As I have talked to women across the country who are going through fertility procedures, I have noticed a common theme that probably doesn’t happen under many other circumstances—the specialized and authorized use of pornography. In fact, many women are buying their husbands porn so they can create their half of the blessed embryo.

One of my girlfriends from college said that she and her husband had gone through several fertility procedures and were getting ready for her husband to go do “his thing” yet another time. “He turns to me and says, ‘do you mind if I buy some new magazines for their office? The ones they have are so old.’ I agreed…and with that treatment we got pregnant!”

A woman I met from church relayed a great story about her IVF experience. It seemed that her husband was pretty anxious about the whole “deposit” process. Men have to produce the magical fluid on the day their wives go into surgery to have their eggs removed, so that they can be immediately joined in the romantic locale of a petri dish. Apparently, her husband couldn’t produce that morning within the sterile and clinical confines of the hospital, so this lovely church-going woman mentioned as she was being wheeled back for surgery that she had a nice porn video for him at home. He rushed home, threw the video into the VCR, performed the vital deed and raced the precious liquid back to the hospital. It was worth it; she was able to get pregnant from one of the resulting embryos.

A well-prepared husband of a friend had planned out his sperm producing session in advance. Forget the magazines that the fertility clinic provided. He had downloaded some porn videos from the internet (with his wife’s permission) onto his small laptop and brought it with him instead of using the visual aids in the doctor’s office. If only our guys gave as much thought and organization to other things like planning for in-law visits or packing for vacation…

Yet another friend told me that when her husband went back to give his sample, they provided the donors with a DVD player to watch movies. But, their player was broken. Ever the Mr. Fix-It, he proceeded to tinker around with the player in order to make it work. Ten minutes later, he finally remembered why he was in there and grabbed a magazine.

During a friend’s so-called “turkey baster” or artificial insemination cycle, her sweet husband went back to produce his part of the equation. After the doctor performed the task of sending the sperm into her uterus, she laid there for two hours waiting for the sperm to make their way to her egg. As she lay there, her husband delivered some less-than-optimal information. Yes, there was porn in the “sample producing” room, and he got to see an issue of the latest porn magazine with Jenna Jameson, the so-called “Queen of Porn.” “Great,” said my friend, “he was thinking of her while producing one half of our potential spawn.”