We read with great interest the new and more inclusive definition of infertility by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) (1), which seeks to expand this terminology beyond physical/medical inability to conceive to also include “social infertility”, which is the inability to have offspring due to various personal circumstances such as same-sex relationships and sex reassignment surgery. This may justify state subsidies, insurance coverage, and employment benefits for medical intervention with assisted reproductive technologies in such non–medically indicated cases.

Source: Bone

In 1987, medical anthropologist Emily Martin published her groundbreaking book The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, in which she grounded the female experience of reproduction within the historical sociocultural processes structuring women's embodiment in the USA during the 20th century. Martin focused on capitalism's influence on medicine, arguing that it shaped how the medical profession defined reproduction, and, in turn, how women understood their bodies. She argued that medical texts typically treated female reproduction as production, successful when reaching its “goal” (eg, pregnancy and livebirth) but as “failed” otherwise (eg, menstruation or menopause).