Abstract
This study undertook to explore the narratives of five South African women’s experience with
infertility. Two women are black; two women are white and one woman is Indian. All five participants
are professional women who enjoy high socioeconomic
status.
No priority was given to whether infertility was a current or past experience although it subsequently
became evident that all five women continue to live in hope for a baby. While one is not “doing
anything to prevent it from happening” others remain active, to different extents, in the process of
falling pregnant.
The experience was explored to discover what impact the infertility had on their life specifically in the
experience of themselves as women and secondly, in their interactions with others. What was evident
that the experience of infertility did impact on their physical, psychological, emotional, social and
spiritual being. However, emotional responses did not generally flow in a particular pattern or cycle as
suggested by literature and in their individual processes participants varied in terms of the emotions
experienced and their intensity.
Generally, the participants did not experience themselves, their identity or femininity as being
compromised nor did they show continuously heightened levels of anxiety or any other pathology. None
of them experienced continued stigma and none of them feel they do not belong or are ostracised by
their communities and other contexts.
All participants seemed to enjoy an internal locus of control in moving them from difficult spaces to
spaces that were more manageable in which their overall functioning and being in the world was not
less than what it had been before. All participants had, or anticipated, making meaning from the
experience and they felt that they had developed and continually grow as individuals.
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Recommendations for education, communication and improved health care have been proposed. It is
suggested that further research utilise a more random and greater sample of infertile women as well as
longitudinal studies on the longterm
experience of infertility.
Dr A. Novello