BOB ABERNETHY: Infertility is a growing problem in America. One out of six couples face this painful challenge. For religious couples, the challenge can be particularly difficult -- and complex, as it was for several matriarchs in the Bible. Our correspondent Betty Rollin talks with couples from various religious traditions who are struggling with faith and infertility.

MICHELLE (from St. Louis): You question, "Was there something that I had done at some point that had angered God so much that this was payback?"

JULI BUSSE: Discerning God's will is very hard when you have, especially when you have, an unexplained infertility.

CINDY HAMADA: You have all these other things going on in your life; this doesn't define you as a woman. But in Judaism, as a woman, I felt that it very much did.

KEITH HAMADA: How could God be doing this to me? Why me? What did I do to deserve the possibility of never having children.

BETTY ROLLIN: Be fruitful and multiply: a Biblical commandment and one that these religious couples desperately want to obey. But they can't.

MRS. HAMADA: It's an automatic assumption that something's wrong if you don't have a child after two years.

ROLLIN: For many religious couples, the very place where they would normally seek solace, their house of worship, was the place that hurt them the most.

MICHELLE: ... We would go to Mass each week and see all these families with young children, and there were many Sundays that I had to choke back tears -- I had to leave a few times. I just couldn't take it.

ROLLIN: Reverend Laura Taylor, United Methodist minister, who herself struggled with infertility, recently addressed the St. Louis chapter of Resolve, an infertility support group.

REVEREND LAURA TAYLOR: People around us, well-meaning people in our church community and other places, started saying things like, "Maybe it's not God's will for you to have children."

MS. BUSSE: We are the invisible ones and it's hurtful, and it does distance us from our church communities. There is no place there for us.

REVEREND TAYLOR: Religious communities need to do more to help people struggling with infertility. They need to find ways to reach out and offer hope, whether it's through sermons, whether it's through support groups, study groups where people could come and ask the hard questions.

ROLLIN: Resolve has sent letters to religious organizations to try to get them to be more sensitive to this problem.

Today, reproductive technology offers infertile couples new hope. Here at the genesis clinic in Brooklyn, New York, they are creating embryos by inserting sperm into eggs. But some religions have restrictions on the use of technology. Dr. Richard Grazi, the clinic's director treats many religious couples.

DR. RICHARD GRAZI (Genesis Fertility & Reproductive Medicine): I understand that there will be times when I, as a physician, am going to be frustrated because I know I have something that will help this couple to get what they want, but I can't deliver because there is a religious objection.

ROLLIN: For example, through in-vitro fertilization many embryos are created, and a few are selected, thus increasing the chances of a successful pregnancy. But Catholicism prohibits discarding the unused embryos; they consider that abortion.