In the final of our ‘Recalibrating Stigma’ mini-takeover, Caroline Law and Harriet Cooper explores how stigma operates in relation to reproductive norms.
Our expectations of conception, reproduction, and family-building are imbued with reproductive norms. In our younger years, we may imagine and expect that we will have a certain number of children at specific ages or points in the life-course, and in particular circumstances. We may think that conception will be straightforward, pregnancy will pass without complications, and our children will be healthy and without disabilities or impairments. We may have hazy, dreamy ideas of what our children will be like and perhaps more defined ideas of what we will be like as parents.
Of course, these imaginaries and expectations are riddled with complexities and variance. For queer people who want children, paths to family-building will be expected to be more complex and require some assistance. People with genetic conditions wanting to have children may undergo IVF with embryo testing or use donor gametes. And, of course, rising numbers of people are choosing to defy cultural expectations and remain child-free. But despite growing diversity in routes to family-building and the constitution of families, reproductive norms – that is, social and cultural rules and expectations around having children – prevail. These norms are shaped by societal values which privilege fertility, heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, and the nuclear family. These are evident in people’s (mostly innocent) assumptions that others want to and will have children. Hence the regularity in which people face the question ‘when are you going to settle down and have kids?’
But what happens when our reproductive experiences do not follow the path we (or others) had hoped or expected – that is, when they fall outside of reproductive norms? Do we automatically experience stigma? And if so, what do people do in the face of this stigma? What resources are available for people to talk about, reimagine, and work through such stigma? The presence or absence of stigma, and the ways in which it affects people, will likely vary for diverse social groups and according to different structural characteristics, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic privilege/disadvantage, and sexuality. As we know that some social groups are more encouraged and expected to have (the right number of healthy) children than others, it is also likely that some people experience reproduction-related stigma more than others, and some people have greater opportunities to rework and subvert stigma than others.
This variance in how stigma is (or is not) experienced illuminates the significance of the social context in understanding/defining how stigma operates. In his classic work on stigma, sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) argues that attributes (e.g. infertility or disability) are not stigmatised in and of themselves; they only become stigmatised if they are at odds with our expectations of what that person should be, and it is the social and relational contexts that determine this. Indeed, particular social identities are devalued in some settings and not others, and it is within a particular social context that we find reproductive norms. Therefore, if we want to challenge stigma, we must confront reproductive norms, and the values that underpin these norms – including values relating to masculinity and ableism, as we discuss in our chapters in Recalibrating Stigma (Thomas et al., 2025), but also values relating to wider gender assumptions, heteronormativity, and White privilege, to name just some.
Thinking about the ways stigma varies also brings us to questions of how stigma can be observed, measured, recorded, and compared, and how we can meaningfully research stigma. Recalibrating Stigma (Thomas et al. 2025) seeks to move this research agenda forward, emphasising the importance of addressing structural components of stigma, but also the ways in which stigmatisation occurs through interactions and relations in everyday life with family, friends, and wider social and cultural networks. In our respective chapters, we discuss how reproductive norms and stigma intersect in two instances: 1) male infertility, and; 2) parenting a disabled child.
Male Infertility (Caroline Law)
Idealised forms of masculinity – social expectations about the ‘most ideal’ way of being a man’ – privilege both virility (comprising sexual strength, drive, and energy) and fertility (the capacity to reproduce). Men are commonly expected to be able to both ‘perform’ sexually and conceive children through sex; and virility and fertility are commonly assumed to be one and the same (Lloyd, 1996). As such, reproductive norms about male fertility are intertwined with masculinity, and with ideas about what we expect men to be. It is often assumed that men experiencing infertility will therefore experience stigma. However, while research highlights the difficult and often distressing impacts of male infertility, it fails to explore stigma in a meaningful way – often under-interrogating the mechanics of how stigma operates and failing to engage meaningfully with stigma theory in analysis – and there is too little research to illuminate if and how stigma plays out in this context. What we do know is often drawn from research with White heterosexual men in the Global North. This limits our understanding of how male infertility and stigma vary according to factors such as ethnicity, class, country, culture, and sexuality. We need more and better research to engage with male infertility, and for such research to cast a deeper and more theoretical lens on how, or indeed if, stigma is encountered by men experiencing infertility.
In the chapter ‘Shooting Blanks?’, Hanna Hudson and I examine assumptions about the relationships between masculinity and stigma in the context of male fertility. Reproductive expectations can be disrupted in several ways. In previous work, for example, I have been curious about how disruptions to ‘normative’ fertility are experienced in other contexts, such as amongst heterosexual couples dealing with endometriosis (Hudson et al., 2016) and amongst unpartnered men who wish to have children (Law, 2024). In ‘Shooting Blanks?’, we were keen to consider these expectations and disruptions with respect to male infertility. We set out to explore the context in which, and the values that underpin, normative assumptions of male infertility, especially those values concerned with what it means to be a ‘real man’. Are men who experience infertility stigmatised? Or do we just assume they are, given the lack of research exploring male in/fertility (Daniels, 2006)?
Parenting a disabled child (Harriet Cooper)
Reproductive norms, and their role in shaping the meanings attributed to childhood disability, have long animated my thinking. Elsewhere, I have explored how the arrival of a disabled child disrupts an imagined future, and an imagined narrative of how a life, and a family, is supposed to unfold (Cooper, 2020). In my chapter for Recalibrating Stigma, I considered parental memoirs as a site where parents seek to narrate their disabled children’s lives. I focused on two memoirs that speak directly to the question of how the arrival of a disabled child disrupts a normative narrative of family life. For example, in Raising Henry: A memoir of motherhood, disability and discovery, author and mother Rachel Adams observes that ‘[w]e live in a world where a baby like Henry demands a story’ (Adams, 2013, p. 108).
The parental memoir has been conceptualised as a vehicle for recuperating the personhood of children whose lives have been stigmatised by a diagnosis of disability (Apgar, 2023). I am interested in the question of who is given the opportunity to remake the meaning of childhood disability via memoir, and how memoir may only tell us about certain sorts of lives (i.e. White, middle-class, financially and culturally privileged).
Since the project of parental memoir-writing seems so often to be about trying to problematise normative narratives of parenthood and childhood, I am interested in exploring whether memoirs can, in fact, change or reduce the stigma around disability’s arrival at a political and societal level. What does this kind of writing achieve, and for whom? We can think about memoir as a form that is part of a wider contemporary cultural practice of self-curation (including via social media platforms). How, and to what effect, do these sites and spaces afford opportunities for the re-purposing and re-narrativising of disability’s arrival? Who gets access to these sites and spaces, and what stories do they tell us about disability’s arrival and about reproductive norms? In essence, are memoirs a means to destigmatise disability?
Stigma and reproductive norms
Our chapters shine a spotlight on what happens when unexpected events disrupt our taken-for-granted expectations regarding reproduction and family-building. Is it necessarily the case that people experience stigma when their lives do not unfold according to anticipated reproductive norms? This question takes us back to the issue of how we define stigma. Is stigma an ‘inner’ or ‘outer’ experience – a division Scambler (2004) refers to as ‘felt’ or ‘enacted’ stigma – or does this question create a false binary between the internal world and the external world? In what settings do we assume, perhaps incorrectly, that stigmatisation occurs, and that it happens in the same way for everyone?
One of the goals of Recalibrating Stigma is to invite readers to consider how sociological theorising can act on the world. We hope that the book will encourage readers to examine and reconsider the assumptions and attitudes we all hold, and the ways in which these can (often inadvertently) contribute to stigma in reproduction and family-building. We see such self-reflection as a necessary component of challenging and reducing stigma.
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The edited collection Recalibrating Stigma: Sociologies of Health and Illness is available as an open access e-book (i.e. free to read and download) via the Bristol University Press website.
About the authors
Caroline Law is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Reproduction Research, De Montfort University, UK. A sociologist primarily engaged in qualitative research, her research interests include intersections between in/fertility and reproduction, men and masculinities, and chronic illness.
Harriet Cooper is a Lecturer in Medical Education at Norwich Medical School at the University of East Anglia, where she leads curriculum components in sociology and humanities. Harriet’s recent writing has explored shame and stigma in relation to experiences and representations of illness and disability.
References
Adams, R. 2013. Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Ahmed, S. 2010. The Promise of Happiness, Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Apgar, A. 2023. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Cooper, H. 2020. Critical Disability Studies and the Disabled Child: Unsettling Distinctions, London: Routledge.
Daniels C.R. 2006. Exposing Men. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Hudson, N., Culley, L., Law, C., Mitchell, H., Denny, E., Raine-Fenning, N. .2016. “We needed to change the mission statement of the marriage’: biographical disruptions, appraisals and revisions amongst couples living with endometriosis.” Sociology of Health and Illness, 38(5): 721–735.
Law, C. 2024. “Men, intimate connections and the timing of fatherhood: conceptualising ‘misconnect’ within the Sociology of Personal Life.”, Sociology, 59 (1): 89-106.
Lloyd, M. 1996. “Condemned to be meaningful: Non-response in studies
of men and infertility.” Sociology of Health and Illness, 18(4): 433–54.
Scambler, G. 2004.“Re-framing Stigma: Felt and Enacted Stigma and Challenges to the Sociology of Chronic and Disabling Conditions.” Social Theory and Health, 2: 29-46. doi:10.1057/palgrave.sth.8700012
Thomas, G.M., Williams, O., Spratt, T. and Chandler, A. 2025. Recalibrating Stigma: Sociologies of Health and Illness. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
