‘Falling down the rabbit hole’: The construction of infertility by news media

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study is to investigate how Canadian print news frames infertility. Background: The way the media frames issues can affect the public’s interpretation of those issues. News coverage often frames health issues as highly alarming with few coping strategies, which tends to elicit fear, worry and avoidance, but no increase in issue knowledge or personal efficacy regarding the health issue. The present study will investigate the framing of infertility-related print news with respect to alarm, coping, medicalisation, genderisation, and identified causes/solutions. Methods: A content analysis was conducted on Canadian print news articles that contained the key word ‘infertility’ in the year 2012 (N = 157). Two independent raters analysed the articles using a pre-determined coding strategy. Results: Just over half of the articles employed alarm frames, and the vast majority of these met the criteria for categorisation as high alarm. The most commonly cited cause of infertility was delayed childbearing and the most frequently presented way to cope with infertility was in vitro fertilisation. Infertility was most often constructed as a women’s issue. Conclusion: Canadian print news media tends to present an alarming portrayal of infertility that adheres to a biomedical perspective that often conflates infertility with involuntary childlessness.

Keywords:

• infertility
• framing
• medicalisation
• media
• content analysis

Notes

1. Following the recommendations of Neuendorf (2002), a pilot study was conducted to validate the applicability of Chang’s (2012) coding scheme to the specific issue of print news coverage of infertility within a North American context. A random sample of 12 articles appearing in Canadian print media in 2011 (the year prior to the study target year) was obtained from the Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies using the same search word, ‘infertility’. On the basis of this pilot study, we concluded that we could adopt Chang’s scheme to code the presence of alarm and coping frames in infertility-related news articles without the need for modifications.

Additional information

Funding

Funding. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.