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Introduction: Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives

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The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History

Abstract

This Introduction argues that historical scholarship offers a vital corrective to present-minded assumptions about infertility, which often conflate the experience of infertility with the effects of reproductive technologies. Infertility is as old as recorded history, and yet for the most part its history remains unwritten. This neglect stems partly from difficulties in defining infertility. Medicalized definitions often hide political and structural issues that affect how infertility is researched. This problem is compounded by the secrecy, shame, and silence that has often surrounded infertility in past and present societies. Historians must develop creative techniques for locating and reading surviving evidence of infertility. Historicized perspectives can alter our understandings of four topics central to studies of infertility in contemporary societies: medicine and reproductive technology, kinship, stratified reproduction, and gender. Even more importantly, newly historicized understandings of infertility can help sufferers to understand and to exert increased control over the condition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Grandmother Sharon Cutts, 55, becomes Britain’s Oldest Mother of Triplets’, Guardian, 6 April 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/06/grandmother-sharon-cutts-55-becomes-britains-oldest-mother-of-triplets. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  2. 2.

    Maya N. Mascarenhas, Seth R. Flaxman, Ties Boerma, Sheryl Vanderpoel, and Gretchen A. Stevens, ‘National, Regional, and Global Trends in Infertility Prevalence since 1990: A Systematic Analysis of 277 Health Surveys’, PLOS Medicine, 9:12 (December 2012), p. 9.

  3. 3.

    Nikki Watkins, ‘Gran, 55, Gives Birth to TRIPLETS, Smashing British Record […] and Looks Her Best for Birth with Botox’, Sun, 6 April 2016: https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/reallife/1115752/gran-55-gives-birth-to-triplets-smashing-british-record-and-looks-her-best-for-birth-with-botox/; Martin Robinson and Keiligh Baker, ‘Grown Up Son of 55-Year-Old Grandmother Who Has Become Britain’s Oldest Mother of Triplets Reveals He Thinks She is Too Old to Go Through IVF’, Mail Online, 6 April 2016: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3525668/Grandmother-55-Britain-s-oldest-mother-triplets.html; Paul Hooper, ‘Meet the Granny Who Has Just Become Britain’s Oldest Mum to Triplets’, Mirror, 6 April 2016: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/meet-granny-who-just-become-7698453. All accessed 6 December 2016.

  4. 4.

    For some recent examples of such stories, see Aidan Madigan-Curtis, ‘The How, What and Why of Freezing Your Eggs, From Someone Who Has Done It’, Observer Business and Tech, 11 January 2016: http://observer.com/2016/01/i-took-control-of-my-biological-clock-at-age-30/; Julia Leigh, ‘IVF: “I Had the Dread Feeling that I Was Part of Some Greater Experiment”’, Guardian, 6 May 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/07/ivf-i-had-the-dread-feeling-that-i-was-part-of-some-greater-experiment. Both accessed 6 December 2016.

  5. 5.

    On the longer history of media reporting on gender and sexuality, see Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford and New York, 2009), and Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, The Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford, 2015), pp. 131–6. On ambivalent responses to technology in modern culture, see David Bell, Science, Technology and Culture (Maidenhead and New York, 2006).

  6. 6.

    On responses to the birth of the Lawson quintuplets, see Linda Bryder, The Rise and Fall of National Women’s Hospital (Auckland, 2014), pp. 108–9.

  7. 7.

    David Beresford, ‘Test Tube Mother Has Girl’, Guardian, 26 July 1978; ‘And Here She Is…THE LOVELY LOUISE’, Daily Mail, 27 July 1978; José van Dijck, Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent: Debating the New Reproductive Technologies (New York, 1995), pp. 63–5.

  8. 8.

    Some important works include Sarah Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction (London and New York, 1997); Gay Becker, The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen (eds), Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender and Reproductive Technologies (London, 2002); Monica Konrad, Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients (New York, 2005); Laura Mamo, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Durham, NC, 2007); Marcia C. Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne (eds), Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives. (Oxford, 2012); Amrita Pande, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (New York, 2014).

  9. 9.

    Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA and London, 2005), p. 79.

  10. 10.

    Marten Stol, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible: Its Mediterranean Setting (Groningen, 2000), pp. 33–7 and pp. 52–4; Eric Jauniaux, ‘An Introduction to Reproduction in Pharaonic Egypt’, Reproductive Biomedicine, 2:2 (2001), pp. 110–11.

  11. 11.

    On the influence of the ancient Egyptian medical tradition on Western medicine, see Marcia C. Inhorn, Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (Philadelphia, PA, 1994), pp. 52–67.

  12. 12.

    Rebecca Flemming, ‘The Invention of Infertility in the Classical Greek World: Medicine, Divinity, and Gender’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 87 (2013), p. 570.

  13. 13.

    On infertility in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, see Philip van der Eijk, ‘On Sterility (‘HA X’), a Medical Work by Aristotle?’, Classical Quarterly, 49 (1999); Rebecca Flemming, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford, 2000), pp. 161–72, 230–46; Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London, 1998), pp. 130–56.

  14. 14.

    See Zohreh Behjati-Ardakani, Mohammad Mehdi Akhondi, Homa Mahmoodzadeh and Seyed Hasan Hosseini, ‘An Evaluation of the Historical Importance of Fertility and Its Reflection in Ancient Mythology’, Journal of Reproduction & Infertility, 17:1 (2016).

  15. 15.

    Genesis 15:2–4: ‘And Abram said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless […] And behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying […] he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir’.

  16. 16.

    Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden, Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (Princeton, NJ, 2015), especially pp. 21–69; Rachel Havrelock, ‘The Myth of Birthing the Hero: Heroic Barrenness in the Hebrew Bible’, Biblical Interpretation, 16 (2008).

  17. 17.

    Marshall Cavendish, Gods, Goddesses and Mythology, Volume 4 (New York, 2005), p. 537.

  18. 18.

    For a fascinating reading of this part of the epic narrative, see Swasti Bhattacharyya, Magical Progeny, Modern Technology: A Hindu Bioethics of Assisted Reproductive Technology (Albany, NY, 2006), pp. 35–48.

  19. 19.

    Rachel Bowlby, ‘Generations’, Textual Practice, 21:1 (2007), p. 8.

  20. 20.

    Stephen Frosh, ‘The Freudian Century’, in Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee (eds), A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (Chichester, West Sussex, 2014), p. 15.

  21. 21.

    Bowlby, ‘Generations’, p.10.

  22. 22.

    Jill Allison, Motherhood and Infertility in Ireland: Understanding the Presence of Absence (Cork, 2013), pp. 1–4.

  23. 23.

    Naomi Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe: A Political History of Reproductive Medicine (Cambridge, 1993), p. 3.

  24. 24.

    For an overview of this scholarship, see Daphna Oren-Magidor and Catherine Rider, ‘Introduction: Infertility in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine’, Social History of Medicine, 29:2 (2016). This is an introduction to a special issue of the journal on infertility in medieval and early modern medicine, further demonstrating the extent of recent interest in the field.

  25. 25.

    Elizabeth Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 81–2; Angela Davis, Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, c. 1945–2000 (Manchester and New York, 2012), p. 183.

  26. 26.

    Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (eds), The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present (Abingdon, Oxon., 2013), pp. 11, 280, 283–4, 302, 307, 353, 388, 484, 489.

  27. 27.

    The relevant chapter is Naomi Pfeffer, ‘The Reproductive Body’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London and New York, 2003), pp. 287–8.

  28. 28.

    Frank van Balen and Marcia C. Inhorn, ‘Introduction. Interpreting Infertility: A View from the Social Sciences’, in Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen (eds), Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 2002), p. 11.

  29. 29.

    Elizabeth A. Sternke and Kathleen Abrahamson, ‘Perceptions of Women with Infertility on Stigma and Disability’, Sexuality and Disability, 33 (2015), p. 12.

  30. 30.

    F. Zegers-Hochschild, G.D. Adamson, J. de Mouzon, O. Ishihara, R. Mansour, K. Nygren, E. Sullivan, and S. van der Poel, on behalf of ICMART and WHO, ‘The International Committee for Monitoring Assisted Reproductive Technology (ICMART) and the World Health Organization (WHO) Revised Glossary on ART Terminology, 2009’, Human Reproduction, 24:11 (2009), p. 2686.

  31. 31.

    Frank van Balen, ‘The Psychologization of Infertility’, in Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen (eds), Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 2002), p. 94.

  32. 32.

    Deborah Lynn Steinberg, ‘The Depersonalisation of Women through the Administration of “In Vitro” Fertilisation’, pp. 93–4.

  33. 33.

    Steinberg, ‘The Depersonalisation of Women’, pp. 91–2. See also Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics (Manchester and New York, 1997), pp. 25–74.

  34. 34.

    Arthur L. Greil and Julia McQuillan, ‘“Trying” Times: Medicalization, Intent, and Ambiguity in the Definition of Infertility’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 24:2 (2010), pp. 139–41 (quotation p. 139).

  35. 35.

    Miriam Ulrich and Ann Weatherall, ‘Motherhood and Infertility: Viewing Motherhood through the Lens of Infertility’, Feminism & Psychology, 10:3 (2000), p. 330.

  36. 36.

    Greil and McQuillan, ‘“Trying” Times’, pp. 150–1.

  37. 37.

    van Balen and Inhorn, ‘Introduction. Interpreting Infertility’, pp. 12–13. For further examples of some of the different orientations to infertility and fertility described by van Balen and Inhorn, see Irina L.G. Todorova and Tatyana Kotzeva, ‘Social Discourses, Women’s Resistive Voices: Facing Involuntary Childlessness in Bulgaria’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 26:2 (2003), p. 144; Anna Winkvist and Humaira Zareen Akhtar, ‘God Should Give Daughters to Rich Families Only: Attitudes Towards Childbearing among Low-Income Women in Punjab, Pakistan’, Social Science & Medicine, 51 (2000).

  38. 38.

    Judith Farquhar, ‘Objects, Processes, and Female Infertility in Chinese Medicine’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 5:4 (1991), p. 374.

  39. 39.

    Flemming, ‘The Invention of Infertility’, pp. 576–7.

  40. 40.

    Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, pp. 76–7.

  41. 41.

    Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women (Oxford, 1984), pp. 156–68; Stuart Blume, ‘Medicine, Technology and Industry’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London and New York, 2003), p. 408.

  42. 42.

    Rosalind Petchesky, ‘Foetal Images: the Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction’, in Michelle Stanworth (ed.), Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine (Cambridge, 1987).

  43. 43.

    Cathy McClive, ‘The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe’, Social History of Medicine, 15:2 (2002), quotations pp. 211–12.

  44. 44.

    Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, pp. 16–17; Roberts, Women and Families, pp. 81–2.

  45. 45.

    For an overview of recent trends in the history of sexuality, see Jeffrey Weeks, What is Sexual History? (Cambridge, 2016); for the history of medicine, see Mark Jackson, ‘Introduction’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (Oxford and New York, 2011).

  46. 46.

    Sally Alexander, ‘The Mysteries and Secrets of Women’s Bodies: Sexual Knowledge in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London and New York, 1996), p. 163.

  47. 47.

    Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918–1960 (Oxford and New York, 2006), especially pp. 26–75, 189–237.

  48. 48.

    Arthur L. Greil, ‘Infertility and Psychological Distress: A Critical Review of the Literature’, Social Science and Medicine, 45:11 (1997), pp. 1682–83, 1694; Arthur L. Greil, Kathleen Slauson-Blevins, and Julia McQuillan, ‘The Experience of Infertility: A Review of Recent Literature’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 32:1 (2010), pp. 145, 147–8; Rossela Ardenti, Cinzia Campari, Lorenza Agazzi, and Giovanni Battista La Sala, ‘Anxiety and Perceptive Functioning of Infertile Women During In-Vitro Fertilization: Exploratory Survey of an Italian Sample’, Human Reproduction, 14:12 (1999), p. 3132; Gay Becker, Martha Castrillo, Rebecca Jackson and Robert D. Nachtigal, ‘Infertility among Low-Income Latinos’, Fertility and Sterility, 85:4 (2006), p. 886; Latifat Ibisomi and Netsayi Noris Mudege, ‘Childlessness in Nigeria: Perceptions and Acceptability’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 16:1 (2014), pp. 62, 68; Ruoxi Yu, ‘The Girl with the Peanut Necklace: Experiences of Infertility and In Vitro Fertilization in China’, EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale, 24 April 2015, pp. 23–30: http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=ceas_student_work. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  49. 49.

    Papreen Nahar and Annemiek Richters, ‘Suffering of Childless Women in Bangladesh: The Intersection of Social Identities of Gender and Class’, Anthropology & Medicine, 18:3 (2011), p. 331.

  50. 50.

    Katja Triplett, ‘For Mothers and Sisters: Care of the Reproductive Female Body in the Medico-Ritual World of Early and Medieval Japan’, Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam, 34:2 (2014), p. 337; Daphna Oren-Magidor, ‘From Anne to Hannah: Religious Views of Infertility in Post-Reformation England’, Journal of Women’s History, 27:3 (2015); Gülhan Balsoy, The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 (Abingdon, Oxon., and New York, 2013), pp. 109, 111.

  51. 51.

    For an account of reading ‘against the grain’, see Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric and Proof: The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures (Hanover, NH, 1999), pp. 23–4. Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History From Below’, Theory and Society, 14:2 (1985), pp. 183–5, contains perceptive reflections on how medical historians can approach the history of the (relatively) powerless.

  52. 52.

    The classic formulation of this problem is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossman (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke, 1988). Estelle B. Freedman and John D’ Emilio, ‘Problems Encountered in Writing the History of Sexuality: Sources, Theory and Interpretation’, in Jennifer Ellen Robinson (ed.), Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader (Malden, MA, 2005) considers how these problems affect research in the history of sexuality.

  53. 53.

    The discussions that follow are based on Charlotte Newman Goldy, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Woman Crossing Boundaries: Visible and Invisible’, Journal of Medieval History, 34:2 (2008), and Susan Broomhall, ‘“Women’s Little Secrets”: Defining the Boundaries of Reproductive Knowledge in Sixteenth-Century France’, Social History of Medicine, 15:1 (2002).

  54. 54.

    Goldy, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Woman’, p. 135.

  55. 55.

    Broomhall, ‘“Women’s Little Secrets”’, p. 3.

  56. 56.

    Goldy, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Woman’, pp. 140–44. On infertility during the medieval period, see Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 228–58.

  57. 57.

    Broomhall, ‘“Women’s Little Secrets”’, p. 14.

  58. 58.

    Thompson, Making Parents, p. 11.

  59. 59.

    See, for example, Melissa S. Williams, Voice, Trust and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton, NJ, 1998), especially pp. 176–202.

  60. 60.

    A. Woollett, ‘Childlessness: Strategies for Coping with Infertility’, International Journal of Behavioral Development, 8 (1985); D.C. Davis and C.N. Dearman, ‘Coping Strategies of Infertile Women’, Journal of Obstetrics, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, 20:3 (1991); Ulrich and Weatherall, ‘Motherhood and Infertility’, p. 329; D.C. Parry, ‘Women’s Experiences with Infertility: Exploring the Outcome of Empowerment’, Women’s Studies, 34:2 (2005).

  61. 61.

    See Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD, and London 1996), pp. 41–74.

  62. 62.

    Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, pp. 62, 66.

  63. 63.

    Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, pp. 123–6. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, there was considerable experimentation with testosterone rebound therapy, based on the theory that following withdrawal from testosterone therapy, the sperm count might actually rise. Although some trials in the 1970s suggested positive results, this therapy has been abandoned in recent years following research demonstrating that exogenous testosterone is detrimental to sperm production. Karen E. Boyle, ‘Nonsurgical Treatment of Male Infertility: Empiric Therapy’, in Larry I. Lipshultz, Stuart S. Howards, and Craig S. Niederberger (eds), Infertility in the Male, 4th edn (Cambridge, 2009), p. 447.

  64. 64.

    Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, pp. 112–23, 157–8.

  65. 65.

    van Balen, ‘The Psychologization of Infertility’, p. 79.

  66. 66.

    In 2010, the average success rate for IVF in women under 35 was 32.2 per cent. See Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, ‘Latest UK IVF Figures: 2010 and 2011’: http://www.hfea.gov.uk/ivf-figures-2006.html. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  67. 67.

    On some of these consequences, see Duncan Wilson, The Making of British Bioethics (Manchester, 2014).

  68. 68.

    Farquhar, ‘Objects, Processes, and Female Infertility in Chinese Medicine’, pp. 373–4; Becker et al, ‘Infertility among Low-Income Latinos’, pp. 884, 886; Nahar and Richters, ‘Suffering of Childless Women in Bangladesh’, p. 332; J. Schaffir, A. McGee, and E. Kennard, ‘Use of Nonmedical Treatments by Infertility Patients’, Journal of Reproductive Medicine, 54:7 (2009).

  69. 69.

    van Balen, ‘The Psychologization of Infertility’, p. 93.

  70. 70.

    Katherine Park, ‘Medicine and Magic: The Healing Arts’, in Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (eds), Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (London, 1998), pp. 129–30.

  71. 71.

    See, for example, Mamo, Queering Reproduction; Lori Andrews, Between Strangers: Surrogate Mothers, Expectant Fathers, and Brave New Babies (New York, 1989); Sarah Franklin, Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship (Durham, NC, 2013); Tabitha Freeman, Susanna Graham, Fatemeh Ebtehaj and Martin Richards (eds), Relatedness in Assisted Reproduction: Families, Origins and Identities (Cambridge, 2014); Susan Golombok, Modern Families. Parents and Children in New Family Forms (Cambridge, 2015).

  72. 72.

    Bowlby, ‘Generations’, pp. 4, 11.

  73. 73.

    Pat Thane, ‘Family Life and “Normality” in Postwar British Culture’, in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds), Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003), p. 198.

  74. 74.

    Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London and New York, 1999), especially pp. 77–98, 161–82, 267.

  75. 75.

    Shellee Colen, ‘“Like a Mother to Them”: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York’, in Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (eds), Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1995), p. 78.

  76. 76.

    See, for example, Susan Markens, Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2007); Holly Donahue Singh, ‘The World’s Back Womb? Commercial Surrogacy and Infertility Inequalities in India’, American Anthropologist, 114 (2013); Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta, (eds), Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life (Lanham, MD, 2014); Pande, Wombs in Labor; Laura Harrison, ‘“I am the Baby’s Real Mother”: Reproductive Tourism, Race, and the Transnational Construction of Kinship’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 47 (2014); Frances Winddance Twine, Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market, 2nd edn (New York, 2015).

  77. 77.

    Marsh and Ronner, The Empty Cradle, pp. 50–1.

  78. 78.

    Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, pp. 41–3.

  79. 79.

    Bowlby, ‘Generations’, p. 13.

  80. 80.

    For a lively if dated anthropological and historical overview, see Sheila Kitzinger, Women as Mothers (Glasgow, 1978), pp. 72–103, 226–46.

  81. 81.

    van Balen and Inhorn, ‘Introduction. Interpreting Infertility’, p. 7.

  82. 82.

    Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, p. 61.

  83. 83.

    Arthur L. Greil, ‘Infertile Bodies: Medicalization, Metaphor, and Agency’, in Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen (eds), Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 2002), p. 101.

  84. 84.

    van Balen and Inhorn, ‘Introduction. Interpreting Infertility’, p. 19.

  85. 85.

    Marcia C. Inhorn, ‘“The Worms are Weak”: Male Infertility and Patriarchal Paradoxes in Egypt’, Men and Masculinities, 5:3 (2003), pp. 248–9.

  86. 86.

    Karen Throsby and Rosalind Gill, ‘“It’s Different for Men”: Masculinity and IVF’, Men and Masculinities, 6:4 (2004), quotation p. 335.

  87. 87.

    See for example Judith C. Mueller, ‘Fallen Men: Representations of Male Impotence in Britain’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 28 (1999), p. 92; Michael Finn, ‘Female Sterilization and Artificial Insemination at the French Fin de Siècle: Facts and Fictions’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18:1 (2009), p. 26.

  88. 88.

    See especially the chapters by Totelin, Gurtler, Roberts, and Rider.

  89. 89.

    David Cross, ‘Life Found Under S Pole Ice Shelf’, Times, 10 January 1978, p. 6.

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  1. Department of History, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom

    Tracey Loughran

  2. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Gayle Davis

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    Gayle Davis

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    Tracey Loughran

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Loughran, T., Davis, G. (2017). Introduction: Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_1

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