Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences With Infertility: Five Short Stories

Abstract

The following five representations are part of a collection of stories written about women’s lived experiences with infertility in North America, a pronatalist society. Within a pronatalist society, women struggling with infertility face profound social and political pressure to define themselves as unsuccessful childbearing objects. The collection of stories included in this text is about the various meanings the women made, the constructions they developed, and the experiences they encountered with infertility. The use of short stories was selected to give voice to women’s experiences with infertility and to assert that knowing and knowledge about infertility must begin with those who have experienced these struggles. Moreover, the use of narratives draws on earlier work published in this journal and contributes to the dialogue of alternative forms of representation fostered by Qualitative Inquiry.