Sara Bareilles Wrote the Infertility Song I Needed at 28

My co-founder Abby sent me a clip of Sara Bareilles talking about her new song, and it instantly brought tears to my eyes.

I've always said that sitting in the waiting room of a fertility clinic at 28 years young, where everyone was going through a similar experience and yet no one was making eye contact, is what inspired me to start Rescripted.

There's no lonelier feeling than being in a room full of people dealing with the same heartbreaking experience but too ashamed to speak about it, or even look at one another.

That's exactly what Sara captures in "Ladies in a Line," off her new album Good Grief. She's been trying to have a baby for three years, and in a recent interview she said something that deeply resonated: she'd found plenty of women talking about how hard it was once they finally had a healthy baby in their arms, but almost nobody talking from inside the messy middle.

This song sits in that middle. The needles, the waiting, the grief of starting later than planned, a running list of names for a baby who hasn't arrived. She describes the process like swimming in water someone else is directing, with no idea when you'll be allowed to stop. I did several rounds of IVF, so none of that is hard to imagine.

What gets me is that she wrote this before knowing how her own story ends, and it gives me chills thinking how many women will feel less alone because of it.

A 2024 survey found that 39% of women trying to conceive underestimated how lonely it would feel, which makes sense, considering I still think about my own waiting room experience. It's nice to finally have the song none of us could sing out loud back then.