It was proposed that one reason people often fail to use effective contraception methods is that they engage in a systematic distortion of their likelihood of being involved in an unwanted pregnancy relative to others. A survey of undergraduate females found that sexually active women tended to see themselves as less likely than other students, other women their age, and women of childbearing age to become pregnant. The tendency to utilize this illusion of unique invulnerability was related to the use of effective contraception. The more subjects discounted their chances of becoming pregnant relative to others, the less likely they were to use effective methods of birth control.

No abstract

Infertility as a life event can be understood from a number of conceptual perspectives: a developmental crisis, a grief reaction, a disruption of marital contracts and roles, a crisis of identity, sexuality, and/or values, or a challenge of decision-making processes. Stress theory and the construct of boundary ambiguity can augment the understanding of the crisis of infertility by providing a different approach and unique perspective. It is the hypothesis of this article that the involuntarily childless couple may experience infertility as a stress of boundary ambiguity, that is, not knowing who is in and who is out of the family system. As infertile couples attempt to make the transition to parenthood they may experience the child they wish to have as a family member who is psychologically present but physically absent.

Does infertility leave in its wake a unique legacy for parents and children for whom it is a part of the family's history? This was the question posed in a smallscale exploratory study conducted in 1988 on 20 families with a diagnosis of infertility that had attended the University of Minnesota Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinic during 1971-1976. Infertility-treated families explored through semi-structured interviews memories of their infertility experience and perceptions of their parenting. Perceptions of parenting were compared to 10 comparison-group families with no history of reproductive failure. Infertility-treated parents were more likely to rate their parenting as overprotectivef child-centered and/or abusive /neglectful than the comparison-group families. Other primary findings included recall of the infertility experiences as a negative life event, differences between spouses' reactions to infertility,1 increased marital conflict, perceptions of parenthood as improving marital satisfaction, and increased incidence of psychosocial problems.