Are prior pregnancy outcomes relevant for models of fertility-specific distress or infertility helpseeking?

Abstract

Women with prior pregnancy but no live birth are inconsistently termed as either ‘primary infertile’ or ‘secondary infertile’ in psychosocial studies of infertile women. The goal of this study was to discover whether infertile women who had experienced pregnancies but no live births were more similar in attitudes and behaviour to infertile women who had not experienced pregnancies or to those who had live births. We used the National Survey of Fertility Barriers (NSFB), which contains self-reported data from a probability-based sample of US women aged between 25 and 45, to accomplish our goal. In this cross-sectional analysis, infertile women who had not experienced pregnancies were compared on the basis of fertility-specific distress (FSD) and medical help-seeking for infertility to women who had had pregnancies with live births and women with pregnancies but no live births. Women were interviewed by telephone in their homes. Data of 1,027 women who had had an infertility episode within the past 10 years were analysed using multiple regression and logistic regression. Infertile women who had never been pregnant experience higher levels of FSD and were more likely to seek treatment than infertile women who had been pregnant, regardless of the outcome of the pregnancy.

Keywords::

• Infertility
• treatment choice

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by grant R01-HD044144 ‘Infertility: Pathways and Psychosocial Outcomes’ funded by NICHD. Dr. Lynn White (The University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Dr. David R. Johnson (The Pennsylvania State University) were Co-PIs on the first wave of data collection. We thank Jessica Iwachiw for her valuable assistance.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.