Making Sense of Loss: the Disenfranchised Grief of Women Who Are "Contingently Childless"

The incidence of unintentional childlessness in women who have, as popular comment puts it, “left it too late,” is rising markedly in many western nations, yet the experience is not well understood. This paper draws on an exploratory psycho-social study of the experiences of 27 New Zealand women in their 30s and 40s who are “contingently childless”; that is women who have always seen themselves as having children but find themselves at the end of their natural fertility without having done so for social rather than (at least initially) biological reasons. They are engaged in a process of coming to terms with probably not becoming biological mothers and are in the unusual, but not uncommon, position of being neither “voluntarily childless” (since they would like to have a child), nor “involuntarily childless” (since they were/are, at least initially, biologically capable of doing so). Grief and a strong sense of loss emerged as a major theme in the study. The analysis draws on one aspect of this theme; the social “invisibility” of these women’s experience, and the ways it constructs the public and private grieving they do. The paper discusses how the perceived social illegitimacy of these women’s grief creates a painful sense of isolation and alienation for them, and contributes to the silence and lack of understanding that surrounds their experience.