Misconception Fatigue: Towards an Embodied Rhetoric for Infertility Advocacy

Abstract

Equitable access to fertility care remains precarious and often dependent upon definitional rhetoric of infertility, which insurance policies and state legislators use to determine access to alternative family building options. This article builds upon prior rhetorical scholarship on infertility by applying an embodied rhetorics framework to capture the resilience infertile persons exhibit when faced with barriers to build their family. To do this, I share a series of texts self-identified infertile advocates produced as they reflected on their encounters with barriers to accessing care and building their families. As a disease that requires self-disclosure as a form of advocacy, I analyze the visual and written texts produced through an embodied rhetorics framework. These texts are forms of public advocacy in that they make visible the multiple embodied misconceptions infertile persons navigate when trying to build one’s family. I discuss these texts as illustrating “misconception fatigue” which is affective toll that accumulates when advocating for one’s reproductive right to have a family. I conclude by encouraging other rhetorical scholars committed to reproductive justice to adopt an embodied rhetorics framework to their scholarship and develop participatory research projects to support the advocacy needs of marginalized reproductive health communities.