ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 focuses on the effects of gender on infertility and the transition to parenthood drawing on findings from research in the field. Analyses of ARTs from 1990s shows that “gender both biologically and socially understood and enacted is a fundamental principle of categorisation in AR(T)” (Thompson, 2005, 118). ARTs include men as well as women in a process of bio-medicalisation, naturalisation, normalisation and routinisation (Allan et al., 2009) although the male experience has been consistently less studied than the female (Thompson, 2005; Culley et al., 2013). Equally, Hanna and Gough (2015) note that there continues to be an overemphasis on the female experience of infertility in the social science literature (Throsby and Gill 2004) and qualitative studies are needed to illuminate the male experience of infertility, the male desire to parent, what sources of support men seek and how parenting is accommodated into other parts of men’s lives. Experiences of non-donor couples are again illustrated as before.
