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"It’s Way out of my League"

Low-income Women’s Experiences of Medicalized Infertility

University of Michigan

The cultural construction of motherhood represents women of low socioeconomic status (SES) as excessively fertile, placing them outside of the infertility discourse. Previous research on infertility reinforces poor women’s exclusion by focusing on the experiences of women receiving medical treatment, typically women of high SES. In this article, the author explores how 20 poor and working-class women negotiate their experiences of infertility. In-depth interviews expose the contextual experiences of infertility among women of low SES, specifically revealing the structural inequality apparent within those experiences. The women are not passive objects of dominant discourses; they are active subjects in resisting, redefining, and accepting the discourses according to their contexts. Women of low SES are outsiders—within to dominant understandings and resolutions to infertility. Their unique insights not only provide a more nuanced understanding of infertility but they also begin to deconstruct the stratified system of reproduction.

Key Words: reproduction • class • gender • stratification • family • health • medical

Gender & Society, Vol. 23, No. 5, 688-709 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0891243209343708


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