Abstract
Knowledge claims may play an essential role in reproductive decision-making, as individuals seek out, assess, reject, and use information about health and fertility gathered from numerous sources. This paper focuses specifically on childless women’s self-perceptions of knowledge about infertility and age-related fertility decline. How knowledgeable do childless women perceive themselves to be about fertility and infertility in general, and from where they do they obtain this knowledge? Furthermore, how knowledgeable do childless women perceive themselves to be about their own fertility and ability to conceive, and to what do they attribute this knowledge? Data for this project was gathered through semi-structured interviews with 72 childless American women; the interviews were inductively and thematically coded using qualitative-analysis software. Childless women assessed their general knowledge of fertility as confident, self-doubting, or novices, and they claimed multiple sources as the basis of this knowledge, including formal education and training, media and popular culture, and family members and peers. When assessing knowledge about their own fecundity, the women tended to rely on two additional sources: biomedical diagnostics and embodied knowledge. Childless women’s awareness of average statistics of age-related fertility decline did not necessarily translate to individual self-knowledge about their own bodies and fecundity. Because knowledge claims were based on multiple information sources given unequal weight, this raises questions about authoritative knowledge—that is, the knowledge that “counts” for women as they make decisions regarding their future childbearing.
Highlights
Numerous researchers have studied the extent to which women and men are aware of age-related fertility decline—with sometimes contradictory results
Koert, and Anthony Cheung (2012), participants were very knowledgeable about age-related fertility decline but knew far less about the effectiveness of in-vitro fertilization (IVF)
Studies on people’s awareness of the effectiveness of assisted reproductive technologies are relevant to research on age-related fertility decline because they speak to the risks of assuming that fertility treatments can mitigate the risks of delaying childbearing (Hodes-Wertz et al 2013; Johnson and Simon 2012; O’Brien et al 2017)
Summary
Numerous researchers have studied the extent to which women and men are aware of age-related fertility decline—with sometimes contradictory results. In the United Kingdom, a small qualitative study of 18 women over age 35 found that many were unaware of factors (including age) that contribute to infertility risks (Cooke, Mills, and Lavender 2012) Research conducted both in the United States and internationally indicates that awareness of age-related fertility decline is correlated with health literacy and education (Bunting, Tsibulsky, and Boivin 2013; Gossett et al 2013). Writing about women’s subjectivity in standpoint epistemology, Smith describes the “woman knower” who “stands outside textually mediated discourse, in the actualities of her local and particular world She exists in and as a body that is the body of a woman” (1991, 159). What is important is not just what women know about fertility and about their bodies, but how they know what they know, and how they make use of their knowledge
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