Having it all:

Sammanfattning: Fertility struggles interact with our careers and emotional wellbeing in ways we might not ever fully recover from. This research explores how women navigate their careers and maintain their wellbeing when the goal of biological parenthood is complicated in ways we didn’t expect and we can’t control. This study compares the cases of a small cohort of white women in their thirties, living in Britain who have struggled with fertility (myself included), in an attempt to understand how our fertility struggle shapes our careers and wellbeing. This research strives to interrogate the usefulness of the Job Demand Control Stress model to understand work-stress and wellbeing, the Common Sense Model of health regulation to explore how women self-manage fertility struggles and wellbeing and a New Materialist approach to understand the role and power of non-human actors, such as medical apparatus and policy. I also employ an intersectional lens to better understand the cohort and review the shortcomings of the models and limitations of this research.