Conceiving Time? Women who do or do not conceive.

This article explores the importance of time for an understanding of women's experiences of reproductive identity. In order to do this we draw on data from two separate qualitative research projects. The first project is concerned with the experiences of conception, pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood in primagravidae, whilst the second focuses on the experiences of individuals (especially women) who defined themselves (at the time of the fieldwork, or some time previously) as 'involuntarily childless' and/or 'infertile'. These two areas are usually treated as separate; this article, however, explores similarities between them in terms of time and medicalisation. Our central concern, then, is with exploring the similarities of experience for women who do or do not conceive.

[1]  Sarah C. Richards.  Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies , 2003 .

[2]  Peter G. Coleman,et al.  A Fresh Map of Life , 1992 .

[3]  F. Abrams.  Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies , 1994 .

[4]  Gayle Letherby,et al.  Weaving Stories: Personal Auto/Biographies in Feminist Research , 1993 .

[5]  S. Earle,et al.  Gender, identity and reproduction: social perspectives , 2003 .

[6]  J. Cockburn.  For her own good. 150 years of the experts' advice to women , 1979, Medical History.

[7]  Karen Davies,et al.  Capturing women's lives , 1996 .

[8]  Andrew Webster,et al.  New Medical Technologies and Society: Reordering Life , 2004 .

[9]  A. Strauss,et al.  The Discovery of Grounded Theory , 1967 .

[10]  Pamela Jordan.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques , 1994 .

[11]  Liz Stanley,et al.  Breaking out: Feminist consciousness and feminist research , 1984 .

[12]  G. Letherby,et al.  “DEAR RESEARCHER” , 1995 .

[13]  M. C. Inhorn,et al.  Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies , 2002 .

[14]  W. Simonds.  Watching the clock: keeping time during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences. , 2002, Social science & medicine.

[15]  A. Oakley.  Women Confined: Towards a Sociology of Childbirth , 1979 .

[16]  S. Laws.  The sexual politics of pre-menstrual tension , 1983 .

[17]  G. Letherby.  I didn’t Think Much of his Bedside Manner but he was very Skilled at his Job: Medical Encounters in Relation to ‘Infertility’ , 2003 .

[18]  Pablo Santoro.  New medical technologies and society: reordering life , 2008 .

[19]  S. Franklin,et al.  Reproducing reproduction : kinship, power, and technological innovation , 1998 .

[20]  J. Shorney.  Preconception care — the embryo of health promotion , 1990 .

[21]  John Postill.  Clock and Calendar Time , 2002 .

[22]  S. Greenhalgh,et al.  Pragmatic women and body politics , 1998 .

[23]  Barbara Adam,et al.  Time and Social Theory , 1990 .

[24]  M. Oechsle,et al.  Between Paid Work and Private Commitments , 2003 .

[25]  M. Stanworth.  Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine , 1987 .

[26]  G. Letherby,et al.  Managing a Disrupted Lifecourse: Issues of Identity and Emotion Work , 2001 .

[27]  B. Heyman.  Risk, health and health care: a qualitative approach , 1997 .

[28]  K. Knorr-Cetina,et al.  Advances in social theory and methodology : toward an integration of micro- and macro-sociologies , 1981 .

[29]  S. Franklin.  Deconstructing ‘Desperateness’: The Social Construction of Infertility in Popular Representations of New Reproductive Technologies , 1990 .

[30]  B. Rothman.  The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Changes the Experience of Motherhood , 1986 .

[31]  S. Franklin.  Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception , 1997 .

[32]  B. Adam.  Feminist Social Theory Needs Time. Reflections on the Relation between Feminist Thought, Social Theory and Time as an Important Parameter in Social Analysis , 1989 .

[33]  Jeremy N. Morris,et al.  The independent inquiry into inequalities in health , 1998, BMJ.

[34]  D. Conway,et al.  Population study of causes, treatment, and outcome of infertility. , 1985, British medical journal.

[35]  Pamela Cotterill.  Friendly Relations?: Mothers And Their Daughters-In-Law , 1994 .

[36]  J. Kent.  Social Perspectives on Pregnancy and Childbirth for Midwives, Nurses and the Caring Professions , 2000 .

[37]  I. K. Zola,et al.  Medicine as an Institution of Social Control , 1972, The Sociological review.

[38]  L. Marks.  The stork and the syringe: a political history of reproductive medicine , 1994, Medical History.

[39]  G. Darke.  Discourses on the Menopause and Female Sexual Identity , 1996 .

[40]  B. Turner,et al.  Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology , 1992 .

[41]  N. Press,et al.  Why women say yes to prenatal diagnosis. , 1997, Social science & medicine.

[42]  S. Himmelweit.  More Than ‘A Woman's Right to Choose’? , 1988 .

[43]  A. Woollett.  VI. Infertility: From `Inside/Out' to `Outside/In' , 1996 .

[44]  A. Oakley.  The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women , 1986 .

[45]  R. Davis-Floyd.  The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction , 1990 .

[46]  Ronald Frankenberg,et al.  Time, health and medicine , 1994 .

[47]  E. M. DiLapi.  Lesbian mothers and the motherhood hierarchy. , 1989, Journal of homosexuality.

[48]  C. Shilling.  The Body And Social Theory , 1995 .

[49]  V. Berridge.  Health and medicine , 1990 .

[50]  R. Petchesky.  Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom. , 1988 .

[51]  D. Worts,et al.  REVISITING THE CRITIQUE OF MEDICALIZED CHILDBIRTH , 1999 .

[52]  Evelyn Fox Keller,et al.  Body/politics : women and the discourses of science , 1990 .

[53]  Elizabeth Grosz,et al.  Bodies and knowledges: Feminism and the crisis of reason , 1993 .

[54]  Julius A. Roth,et al.  Timetables: Structuring the Passage of Time in Hospital Treatment and Other Careers , 1963 .

[55]  M. Murphy.  Measuring the Family Life Cycle: Concepts, Data and Methods , 1987 .

[56]  Judith Evans.  Feminist Theory Today: An Introduction to Second-Wave Feminism , 1995 .

[57]  D Acheson,et al.  Independent inquiry into inequalities in health , 2005 .