"My Body is Betraying Me": Exploring the Stigma and Coping Strategies for Infertility Among Women Across Ethnic and Racial Groups.

Abstract

Female infertility remains a taboo and carries stigma across various ethnic/racial communities. Infertility-related stigma impairs women's mental well-being, strains their family relationships, and deters them from seeking treatment. In this article, we seek to understand the perceived/self-stigma of infertility and stigma management through in-depth interviews with 29 women (White, African American, and Hispanic) who were facing fertility challenges. Taking an intersectional approach, we focused on how these women's experience of infertility and their stigma coping were shaped by certain gendered, racial, and cultural ideologies deeply entrenched in contemporary U.S. society. Our findings uncovered shared stigmas and coping mechanisms as well as distinct variations that are specific to White, African American, and Hispanic women. The firsthand accounts from our participants revealed the distressing reality of marginalization and silencing of minority women's voices within their families, communities, and society at large. Furthermore, our study underscored how social interactions among women can foster competition, entrenching and bolstering hierarchical stigma power dynamics. This study contributes to the health disparity research by highlighting how women are stratified into different categories based on social class, ethnicity/race, and age. Such classifications ultimately result in differential access to health resources, perpetuating existing social inequality and division.