What I suppose bothers me about this is the fact that the IVF childless are not asking to be separated. If you, as someone who TTC#1, begrudged the women who were tryng for #2,#3, etc, I would think having to be a part of a thread with them would eventually allow you to realise that their pain and journey was the same as yours. And if you didn't realise that at the time, having a sparate thread for them to chat to the exlusion of you certainly wouldn't have helped you learn to be more sympathectic to them, in fact I would expect not having to 'deal' with those suffering secondary infertility might allow you to be less sympathetic.

I recognise that some of you feel the discomfort of posting in the LTTTC forum, whether it's because you can't talk about how IVF is effecting your family, or because you can't post your ticker in this one particular forum. But I believe that it does women who suffer from infertility an injustice to keep catergorising us as different. I have made my point in previous posts: I believe our community has been strong thus far because we intergrate, we learn from each other, we recognise that we are at different stages at our lives, but we also recognise the sameness of our pain and struggle.

BB will never be every thing to every person, and as with every community, you come in, you try to fit, and if you don't want to fit, you try to make your own place. But not everyone will get their own place, it's not possible and it's not always in the community's best interest. Members like me and anney and Willow who have been through this and come out the other side can see how we are getting more and more segregated and, while necessary sometimes, it's divided us and made us less understanding of each other.

So while it may be that a few of you feel like a separate thread for you is warranted, I, and a lot of other people, do not agree that it is the best thing for the BB IVF community. To say you only wish to discuss your journey 'with women who really understand me' or 'to give us somewhere where we can be honest and open about our feelings, without having to hide our children away' implies that those who have not yet had a child are incapable of supporting you, and that is very much is your perception, not the perceptions of those who you assume you can't talk to.

I will also mention that in my time doing IVF, I did in fact discuss my kids in the LTTTC thread, but in the context of how they were affected by my treatment. I was sensitive to those around me, and did not discuss general things about my kids, and I did not display my ticker. That seemed a really small courtesy for me to afford them, and they in turn learnt about me as a person, and as a mother. I'm sure Willow and anney would say the same. So what is it really about? That you don't want to offend anyone or that you want the kind of freedom to discuss your kids that you already have in the rest of BB?

I actually said that I would not have interfered with a thread that was specifically about how IVF effects your family/kids, but this thread was heading towards talking about general IVF stuff under the guise of being only open to mums who are going back to IVF. It was becoming a psuedo chat thread, and it has been discussed and agreed on on many previous occasions that it would not be in the best interests of this forum to have a separate thread for secondary infertility.

It was actually originally decided that this thread be closed should it continue to be general chat, but rather than do that, I came in and explained my reasons in opposing it to you all, and have been open to being convinced otherwise. But I honestly believe that the discomfort and the feeling of not belonging that you have put forward as your main reason for another thread is a flawed perecption that you would eventually get over if you gave it a chance. By your own admissions, many of you have not/not often posted in the LTTTC thread to begin with. At a time when we didn't have a choice, and we all talked in one forum (the donor conception, the LTAC, the LTTTC, the clomid, the natural TTC etc) we all got on just fine because we didn't have the luxury of feeling uncomfortable. We either posted together or we didn't get the support we needed.

So I will put a finer point to this: you can absolutely discuss how IVF effects you and your family in this forum. That, after all, is LTTTC related. So, Bec, if you wanted to discuss the effects of IVF on your DH and DD, can you please start a new thread about that specific topic? And as long as it (and any other threads specifically about IVF-related chld issues) stays on topic, I will not close it.

But the mods have decided that we are not going to have a separate chat thread for secondary infertility, so attempts to create such a thread in LTTTC for the purpose of 'feeling free' to openly discuss your children will be closed henceforth.

Many have asked for their own threads, and if we believe it's in the best interests of the community, we will oblige. We do try our best to please our members. But if we don't agree that it will be in the best interests of the larger community, we try to explain to the best of our ability the reasons behind it, which I well and truly feel I have done now.

This thread will now be closed, and further discussion about this can be done with me directly offline either via PM or email.