The Science of Trying to Conceive: Why the Grief, the Envy, and the Fights Aren't a Character Flaw

Key findings

1. 1993

   Using the same standardized symptom checklist (SCL-90R) across six patient groups, finds infertile women's psychological distress statistically equivalent to that of cancer, cardiac-rehabilitation, and hypertension patients. ↗

2. 2007

   With Cousineau, argues in a major review that infertility's medical framing had let clinicians overlook its full emotional load — distress, loss of control, stigma, and a disrupted sense of adult life-timing. ↗

Key findings

1. 2010

   With Slauson-Blevins and McQuillan, reviews the field and documents envy of other mothers and grief as recurring themes across qualitative studies of infertile women's own accounts — while finding the evidence on relationship damage genuinely mixed. ↗

2. 2007

   With Torres Stone and McQuillan, finds that lifetime infertility itself doesn't directly lower life satisfaction — the drop is conditional, concentrated in women who see infertility as a defining problem and remain without children. ↗

Key findings

1. 2003

   With Newton and Rosen, finds that the gap between partners' perceived infertility-related stress — not either partner's stress level alone — predicts worse marital adjustment and more depression. ↗

2. 2006

   In the largest coping study of its kind (1,026 patients), finds women use proportionately more confrontive coping, responsibility-taking, and support-seeking than men, who use more distancing and self-control — a gendered pattern in style, not in level of care. ↗

3. 2008

   With Pirritano, Christensen and Schmidt, using data from 1,169 Danish women and 1,081 Danish men, shows one partner's coping strategy measurably affects the other partner's own distress — coping is a couple-level process, not just an individual one. ↗