Conceiving Infertility: How Social Class Shapes Infertile Experiences.

[摘要] Despite sharing an equally high prevalence of infertility, poor women of color are constructed ideologically as hyperfertile, while infertility is stereotyped as primarily affecting white higher-class women.Through fifty-eight in-depth interviews, I explore how women of various demographic characteristics understand, live and cope with infertility within such a context.Written chronologically, the dissertation begins by exploring why women want to mother in the first place.The data suggest lower-class women desire motherhood for the individual advantages they will gain from having a baby, so their motivations are centered around the effects of the child.In contrast, higher-class women want to mother not because of what the child will bring them, but because of the mothering role itself.Furthermore, the lower-class women overcame marginalization by redefining ;;good’ motherhood according to their own contexts and comparing themselves to the ideal and other mothers.Higher-class women also compared themselves to women considered to be ;;bad’ mothers in an effort to distance their own mothering from such alabel.In establishing that all of the participants want to mother and believe they will be ;;good’ mothers, the dissertation then explores how the women go about attaining that role.Lower-class women wanted pregnancy to be a ;;natural” process through the use of unprotected intercourse; whereas, higher-class women attempted to control when and how pregnancy would occur by using various technological mechanisms to become pregnant.There were also class differences in the amount of support women received once they recognized their fertility difficulties.Lower-class women had far less support for their infertility struggles than did higher-class women because of different peer groups, marital rates, and discussion of personal topics like infertility within their communities.Finally, how women resolve their infertility, whether medically or not, shaped their experiences.The lower-class women in this study actively and creatively identified ways to overcome the reproductive limits they faced.Given their access to medicine, many higher-class women continued to pursue medical treatment for their infertility.Ultimately, the study reveals the social and cultural forces surrounding reproduction, family, motherhood, and health.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Reproduction

[关键词] Infertility;Reproduction;Motherhood;Race;Class;Gender;Medicalization;Sociology;Social Sciences;Sociology