Failures of Volition: Female Agency and Infertility in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Travel for this study was supported by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Foundation Fund award. 1Infertility: Medical and Social Choices, U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA-BA-358 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, May 1988), 49-57. Until 1982, data on the prevalence of infertility were not reliable, and today there is still no conceptual or methodologic consensus concerning how to determine its prevalence. The literature on infertility characteristically refers to the rising incidence of this dysfunction, but there is no hard evidence that the percentage of marital pairs in the United States unable to have the children they desire has, over the past century, been lower than 10 percent or higher than 20 percent. Within any one time period, estimates vary over this range. Although changes in the incidence of infertility in subgroups, such as black women, and in the incidence of certain diseases or conditions associated with infertility, such as venereal diseases and dietary deficiencies, have occurred, the overall prevalence appears to be rather stable. See W. R. Keye, "Psychosexual Responses to Infertility," Clinics in Obstetrics and Gynecology 27 (September 1984): 760-66, esp. 760; P. Cutright and E. Shorter, "The Effects of Health on the Completed Fertility of Nonwhite and White U.S. Women Born between 1867 and 1935," Journal of Social History 13 (Winter 1979): 191-217; E. Shorter, A History of Women's Bodies (New York: Basic, 1982), esp. 266-67, and "Women's Diseases before 1900," in New