I’m not opposed to more children. It’s just that getting pregnant, for us, has always been about a lot more than a perfectly timed romp in the hay. See, about 10 percent of American couples are hampered by infertility. The US Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health defines the condition as “not being able to get pregnant after one year of trying (or six months if a woman is 35 or older).” The label can also apply to “women who can get pregnant but are unable to stay pregnant.” Six million-plus American women fall into at least one of those categories.

After trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for a year, we turned to in vitro fertilization. Over the next three years Jill got pregnant repeatedly, but most resulted in miscarriage after just six weeks or so. The longest lasted 20 weeks, until a weekend in November 2007 when Jill began to feel terrible cramps. She was in premature labor. An ultrasound in the emergency room revealed our son had no heartbeat.

We went home the next morning wrecked and bitter and empty-handed, hoping that those religious relatives of ours, including my father, a pastor, would wait a long time before calling to tell us how much God cares.

We learned later that the premature labor was the result of Jill’s cervix giving way too early. She’s among the 2 percent of women diagnosed with something called “incompetent cervix,” a condition in which the cervix, the gateway from the uterus to the vagina, weakens too soon. Typically a fetus older than 20 weeks will simply become too heavy for the mother to hold in the uterus.

We kept trying. In 2010, when Jill was 18 weeks pregnant, her cervix started to give way again. But this time the doctors were ready and placed her in the hospital on strict bed rest, where she remained for the next 97 days.

Ninety-seven days of Jill not being able to sit upright, of being bathed by nurses, of being rushed to the cardiac ward because she had an irregular heartbeat. Ninety-seven days of me sleeping on the couch next to her bed, of hoping no news happened during my newspaper shifts, of being grateful for my mother-in-law and my parents, who took care of our house and pets. When Jill was finally allowed to stand up, she only had the strength to walk a few steps at a time.

Still, it worked. Our son, Max, now nearly 21 months old, is a screaming, foot-stomping, curious, bright sweetheart of a testament to it working. So I know why Jill wants another baby — I do, too — but I wonder whether medical science is up to the task of us trying it all over again.

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IN ADDITION TO THE NORMAL WORRIES of most pregnant couples — will the baby be healthy? Can we afford the expense? — Jill and I have to consider our track record with miscarriage, try to predict whether a pregnancy will require another months-long hospital stay, as well as if it could put Jill’s life in jeopardy. We’re far from alone in this.

Davina Fankhauser, a 41-year-old in Newton, lost eight pregnancies to infertility complications. “I don’t think people who haven’t experienced this understand just how much the list of things you have to think about grows once you either suffered a pregnancy loss or have had to have your life turned upside down by being told your pregnancy is high risk,” she says. Fankhauser spent months in bed during her pregnancies with her now 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son, and they still were born early.

In 2011, Fankhauser cofounded a nonprofit called Fertility Within Reach to help couples connect to resources and funding programs, including IVF surrogacy (which involves a host female carrying an embryo created from the egg and sperm of the genetic parents). Fankhauser recently testified before the Massachusetts Division of Insurance. “I explained to them that had my insurance company covered a $7,000 bill for IVF surrogacy,” she says, “they wouldn’t have had to cover a $99,000 NICU bill” when her son was born prematurely.