Betty G. Harris

“SOMEWHERE OUT THERE” Parental Claiming in the Preadoption Waiting Period

This article describes the process of parental claiming expressed in multiple interviews conducted with 35 infertile couples waiting to adopt a child. Parental claiming is the special kind of emotional and intellectual work that adopting couples do prior to placement to make someone elses child “somewhere out there” their own. It involves creating an object to claim, undermining the primacy of blood ties, and transforming someone elses child into the right child for them. This kind of work is particularly important to social actors who aspire to statuses to which they know they are not clearly entitled.

The Clock Has Been Ticking, the Calendar Pages Turning, and We Are Still Waiting: Infertile Couples' Encounter with Time in the Adoption Waiting Period

In this paper, the authors draw from sociological explorations of time and narrative theory to interpret the problem that time posed for 37 infertile couples waiting for a child to adopt. We also address their emotional and behavioral responses to their problematic encounter with time. The adoption waiting period can be usefully conceived of as a: a) temporal irregularity in social life; b) temporally unmarked transitional stage in the passage to parenthood; and as a c) special kind of social construction and product of the imagination. Confronting empty time, waiting couples humanized time spent in waiting and maintained hope by creating a temporal framework for the waiting period. They established a timeline, plotted the end of the wait, and created a rhythm for the duration of the wait. Short-waiting couples were able to maintain a sense of making progress toward their goal of a child. Long-waiting couples increasingly felt as if they were standing still or moving away from their goal. The findings contribute to the understanding of temporality in infertile couples and affirm the uncertainty and discomfort that the lack of temporal order can engender.

Amniocentesis in the context of infertility

The encounter with amniocentesis compels infertile couples to experience again the mix of adversity, uncertainty, and hope characterizing both infertility and prenatal testing. Findings from open-ended interviews of 38 couples, 25 infertile and 13 fertile, participating in an ongoing longitudinal field study of infertile childbearing and adopting couples suggest that amniocentesis both reprises elements of the infertility experience and interrupts elements of the pregnancy experience.

Comparison of pregnancy symptoms of infertile and fertile couples

This study was undertaken to describe the most common symptoms experienced during pregnancy by couples with a history of infertility and to compare them with symptoms of expectant couples without a history of reproductive problems. The Symptomatology Inventory, a 42-item checklist of common pregnancy symptoms, was used. The 10 most frequent symptoms reported and their rank order were very similar for the women from both groups. Men from the two groups frequently reported similar symptoms, but differed on their rank order. This research provides evidence that in terms of pregnancy symptoms infertile and fertile couples are more alike than they are different.