Soutien Social et Abandon de la Consultation Médicale en Clinique de Fertilité

Infertility: Testing a helpseeking model

This paper uses data from a study of 196 infertile women from the Midwestern US to examine a general theory of helpseeking behavior applied to infertility. All of these women report meeting the medical definition of infertility--12 months or more of regular intercourse without conception--at some point in their lives. Only 35 percent of this sample of infertile women identified themselves as having had fertility problems and only 40 percent had sought medical treatment. Drawing on prior theories of helpseeking, we examine the effects of symptom salience, life course cues, attitudes, predisposing factors, and enabling conditions on helpseeking. We posit a model in which a cognitive dimension (perceived infertility) mediates between these predictors and medical helpseeking. Symptom salience (experienced infertility while actively trying to get pregnant), low parity, and poor subjective health are significantly related to perceived infertility, which is, in turn, significantly associated with helpseeking for infertility. Supporting the conclusion that the cognitive dimension of identifying oneself as infertile is critical to helpseeking, the relationship of symptom salience to helpseeking is partially mediated by perceived problems. Internal health locus of control is associated with lower odds of helpseeking but not to perceived infertility.

L'impact de l'infertilité et de ses traitements sur la vie sexuelle et la relation de couple : revue de la littérature

This paper reviews the literature on the psychosocial impact of infertility and its treatments by the ART on the marital sexuality, by paying special attention to the relationship between gender and the infertility experience. It is convenient to divide this literature into articles that explore the sexual life of the infertile couples on the one hand, and those focusing on the couple relationship - marital satisfaction and marital adjustment-, on the other hand. The literature on the infertile couples' sexuality and sexual satisfaction, mostly descriptive, presents infertility as a deleterious experience for both women and men even if the repercussion differ according to gender, with correlative dynamic effects within the couple. The contributions to the investigation of the couple relationship, mostly quantitative Anglo-Saxon studies, have produced equivocal or contradictory results concerning the satisfaction with the relationship, the closeness between the two partners so that it is difficult to assume a trend in this field. This situation is largely due to the problems of sampling. In this view, future research should perform its methodological apparatus to take into account the processual nature of the infertility experience, at both levels of couple history and its involvement in the ART process.

New reproductive technology and the family: the parent-child relationship following in vitro fertilization

Parent-child relationships and the parents' psychosocial functioning were assessed in families with a 24-30-month-old, single born child conceived by homologous in vitro fertilization (IVF) and in a control group of families with a naturally conceived child. The investigation included behavioural observations of mother-child interactions in the home, and self-rated questionnaires. No significant multivariate group effects were found for indicators of the parent-child relationship, nor for the parents' psychosocial functioning. However, in the case of IVF the employment status of the mother was associated with her behaviour towards her child: employed IVF-mothers showed less respect for their child's autonomy compared with both nonemployed IVF-mothers and employed control mothers.