Women from diverse minority ethnic or religious backgrounds desire more infertility education and more culturally and personally sensitive fertility care

This study was based on a one-day drawing workshop to collect visual (artwork produced by participants) and textual (all conversations and discussions during the workshop) data about the participants ’ views and experiences of infertility and their fertility care needs.PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODSParticipants were nine adult women with a minority ethnic or religious status living in Wales, UK, who were experiencing or had experienced infertility in the past. The workshop comprised five activities: (i) small and large group discussion of infertility-related drawings, (ii) lide-based lecture consisting of an introduction to the basics of drawing objects and people and (iii) thoughts and feelings, (iv) free drawing session and (v) group sharing. Audio recordings of the workshop were transcribed verbatim. Textual data was analysed with thematic analysis. Risk for bias was addressed via individual coding by two authors followed by joint presentation and discussion of results with the research team and participants.MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCEForty-one themes were identified and grouped into eight distinct higher order themes. These themes described the emotional, relational and social burden of infertility experienced by women, which they perceived to result from their communities ’ highly pronatalistic attitudes and stigmatization of infertility. Themes also captured women’s adaptive coping strategies and critical attitude towards pronatalist ideologies. ...
Source: Human Reproduction - Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: research