Infertility Around the Globe


Book Description

These essays examine the global impact of infertility as a major reproductive health issue, one that has profoundly affected the lives of countless women and men. The contributors address a range of topics including how the deeply gendered nature of infertility sets the blame on women's shoulders.




Voluntary and Involuntary Childlessness


Book Description

While interest in the drivers, consequences, nature and manifestations of voluntary and involuntary childlessness increases, knowledge progress is hampered by poor linkages across disjointed research fields. The book brings together theoretical insights and empirical investigations into the phenomenon, united within a feminist conceptual framework.




Reconceiving Infertility


Book Description

A more complete picture of how procreation and childlessness are depicted in the Bible In the Book of Genesis, the first words God speaks to humanity are "Be fruitful and multiply." From ancient times to today, these words have been understood as a divine command to procreate. Fertility is viewed as a sign of blessedness and moral uprightness, while infertility is associated with sin and moral failing. Reconceiving Infertility explores traditional interpretations such as these, providing a more complete picture of how procreation and childlessness are depicted in the Bible. Closely examining texts and themes from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Candida Moss and Joel Baden offer vital new perspectives on infertility and the social experiences of the infertile in the biblical tradition. They begin with perhaps the most famous stories of infertility in the Bible—those of the matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel—and show how the divine injunction in Genesis is both a blessing and a curse. Moss and Baden go on to discuss the metaphorical treatments of Israel as a "barren mother," the conception of Jesus, Paul's writings on family and reproduction, and more. They reveal how biblical views on procreation and infertility, and the ancient contexts from which they emerged, were more diverse than we think. Reconceiving Infertility demonstrates that the Bible speaks in many voices about infertility, and lays a biblical foundation for a more supportive religious environment for those suffering from infertility today.




Infertility


Book Description

This book explores the arguments, appeals, and narratives that have defined the meaning of infertility in the modern history of the United States and Europe. Throughout the last century, the inability of women to conceive children has been explained by discrepant views: that women are individually culpable for their own reproductive health problems, or that they require the intervention of medical experts to correct abnormalities. Using doctor-patient correspondence, oral histories, and contemporaneous popular and scientific news coverage, Robin Jensen parses the often thin rhetorical divide between moralization and medicalization, revealing how dominating explanations for infertility have emerged from seemingly competing narratives. Her longitudinal account illustrates the ways in which old arguments and appeals do not disappear in the light of new information, but instead reemerge at subsequent, often seemingly disconnected moments to combine and contend with new assertions. Tracing the transformation of language surrounding infertility from “barrenness” to “(in)fertility,” this rhetorical analysis both explicates how language was and is used to establish the concept of infertility and shows the implications these rhetorical constructions continue to have for individuals and the societies in which they live.




Childlessness in Europe: Contexts, Causes, and Consequences


Book Description

This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This open access book provides an overview of childlessness throughout Europe. It offers a collection of papers written by leading demographers and sociologists that examine contexts, causes, and consequences of childlessness in countries throughout the region.The book features data from all over Europe. It specifically highlights patterns of childlessness in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland. An additional chapter on childlessness in the United States puts the European experience in perspective. The book offers readers such insights as the determinants of lifelong childlessness, whether governments can and should counteract increasing childlessness, how the phenomenon differs across social strata and the role economic uncertainties play. In addition, the book also examines life course dynamics and biographical patterns, assisted reproduction as well as the consequences of childlessness. Childlessness has been increasing rapidly in most European countries in recent decades. This book offers readers expert analysis into this issue from leading experts in the field of family behavior. From causes to consequences, it explores the many facets of childlessness throughout Europe to present a comprehensive portrait of this important demographic and sociological trend.




Coping with Infertility


Book Description

Coping with Infertility is an essential source of emotional support for any couple struggling with involuntary childlessness. The book offers proven techniques and real-life examples from both men and women, in order to outline common emotional reactions and remind couples that they are not alone in their ups and downs. The coping skills discussed in the book have been assembled from years of working with individuals in clinical trials and have undergone rigorous scientific testing. These state-of-the-art techniques have been shown to be effective in helping couples deal with the stress, depression, relationship problems, and grief often associated with infertility. Coping with Infertility is an easily accessible and problem-focused guide for couples to use in overcoming the emotional roadblocks of infertility.




The Oxford Handbook of Perinatal Psychology


Book Description

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. Perinatal psychology is a field devoted to understanding the biopsychosocial experiences of women and men during the transition to parenthood. These experiences include pregnancy, labor, delivery, adjustment and parenting during the postpartum period, lactation, family planning, adoption, infertility, and adjustment to perinatal loss.




Infertility


Book Description

As a researcher whose work focuses largely on the causes and conse quences of unwanted pregnancy, I may appear to be an unlikely candidate to write a foreword to a book on infertility. Yet, many of the themes that emerge in the study of unwanted pregnancy are also apparent in the study of infertility. Moreover, this volume is an important contribution to the literature on fertility, women's health issues, and health psychology in general, all topics with which I have been closely involved over the past two decades. Neither pregnancy nor its absence is inherently desirable: The occurrence of a pregnancy can be met with joy or despair, and its absence can be a cause of relief or anguish. Whether or not these states are wanted, the conscious and unconscious meanings attached to pregnancy and in fertility, the responses of others, the perceived implications of these states, and one's expectations for the future all are critical factors in determining an individual's response. In addition, both unwanted pregnancy and failure to conceive can be socially stigmatized, evoking both overt and subtle social disapproval. Fur ther, they involve not only the woman, but her partner, and potentially the extended family. Finally, both of these reproductive issues have been poorly researched. Because both are emotionally charged and socially stigmatized events, they are difficult to study. Much of the early literature relied on anecdotal or case reports.




Infertility and Non-Traditional Family Building


Book Description

This book examines the representation of infertility, assisted reproduction, miscarriage, adoption and surrogacy in a wide range of media, including blogs, vlogs, social media posts and factual programming. In so doing, it illustrates how pregnancy loss, involuntary childlessness and non-traditional mothering are being depicted across the media landscape. Whilst the topic of motherhood has emerged as a significant area of academic debate, narratives of unsuccessful or unconventional mothering have remained largely absent, even at a time when there is a growing conversation about infertility online. Timely, pertinent and original, the book demonstrates the importance of a broader and more informed cultural discussion about fertility and family building.




Childlessness in the Age of Communication


Book Description

Cristina Archetti started researching childlessness after being diagnosed with "unexplained infertility". She soon discovered that, although involuntary childlessness affects an increasing number of women and men across the world, this topic is shrouded taboo and shame. This book is both a first-person reflection about the existential questions posed by involuntary childlessness and a readable account of the way the silence surrounding this topic is socially and politically constructed. Revealing the invisible mechanisms that, from the microscopic details of everyday life to policy, make up the structure of silence around childlessness, Archetti demonstrates what it means not to have children in a society that is organized around families. Through a prose that mixes analysis, excerpts of interviews, media fragments, and evocative writing, she develops a new language of feeling-in-the-body fit for the twenty-first century and exposes the devastating effects infertility has on relationships, identity, health and well-being, in societies that fetishize parenthood. Childlessness in the Age of Communication draws upon a range of disciplines and fields including sociology, health, gender and sexuality studies, communication, politics and anthropology. It is a book for all those interested in childlessness and innovative qualitative research methodologies.