The Cost of Winning the Pregnancy Lottery

Abstract

In this essay, I narrate my experience with secondary infertility through autoethnography. Nearly three million women in the United States struggle with secondary infertility, defined as the inability to become pregnant and/or carry a child to term after the successful birth of a first child. Through a layered autoethnographic account, I illustrate the simultaneously embodied and disembodied experiences of my journey with secondary infertility utilizing Cloud’s concept of the “null persona.”1 By stressing common experiences on this path—painfully slow lag times toward diagnosis, increased psychological distress, demanding and rigorous physical treatments, and the exorbitant costs associated with assisted reproductive technologies—my work contributes to academic conversations about both infertility and the value of autoethnographic methods to chronicle and critique “past experience to make better, hopeful experiences possible.”2