It is time to recognise the diversity of paths that lead to motherhood, including those that fail, those that take years, and those that lead nowhere. When you think of Mother’s Day, which is widely celebrated across the world in the month of May, and in France on the last Sunday of May each year, you might think: Nice lunch, kids’ crafts and lots of hugs.
Yes, it is a moment of joy for many. But for millions of women, this spring Sunday is also a day of silent pain: women whose pregnancies ended in miscarriage, whose fertility treatment came to nothing, who gave up after years of exhausting hope, or who simply never had the child they longed for. These women are rarely at the centre of the celebrations. And yet their experiences reveal something important about how societies continue to think about fertility, womanhood and time.
Infertility is still a taboo subject
Infertility remains deeply difficult to talk about publicly. Many women still feel expected to carry it quietly and privately, and without making others uncomfortable.
Even now, discussing miscarriage, failed fertility treatment, or involuntary childlessness is often treated as a form of oversharing or inappropriate.
But silence has consequences. In our recent study, we argue that infertility is not simply a medical issue or an emotional struggle. It is also a structural and deeply gendered experience of time.
The burden of infertility, including its emotional labour, time and financial costs, physical demands and social stigma, continues to fall disproportionately on women, who are then expected to suffer in silence and develop their own ways of coping with it.
A difficult road we rarely talk about
In France, approximately one woman in four faces difficulties conceiving and miscarriage affects nearly one in five pregnancies.
Hundreds of thousands of couples turn to assisted reproductive technology (ART) each year, a procedure whose success rates fall well short of what one might hope. For example, an IVF procedure has less than one out of three chances of resulting in a baby for women under 35 and this success rate drops significantly with age.
For many women, the path towards motherhood is long, uncertain, and physically consuming. Yet women who travel that road without success, or who abandon it halfway, are often rendered invisible, as though only the final outcome matters.
This was one of the strongest patterns in the women’s testimonies we analysed.
When time becomes the enemy
What becomes striking in these accounts is how differently time is experienced by men and women.
Women are still expected to build families within socially prescribed timelines: at the “right” age, in the “right” relationship, at the “right” stage of life. These norms are so deeply ingrained that women face constant reminders that they are failing to meet them.
One woman in the study, a Scottish psychologist who struggled through infertility, miscarriages, and termination for medical reasons for years, tells us:
“Birthdays for the last few years have been heavy. Years ticking by with the uncertainty of infertility, meant my birthday turned from a celebration to something I dreaded.”
For her, like for many women in the infertility journey, every appointment, every failed cycle, every birthday that passes without a pregnancy becomes a marker of being “out of sync” with what society expects.
Meanwhile, the labour of managing infertility remains largely invisible and highly gendered. Women’s time in the fertility journey is less valued, less protected, and less compensated than men’s. The hours spent researching clinics, managing hormone schedules, taking time off work for procedures, processing grief after failed cycles – this labour is largely invisible and largely gendered.
Ways women fight back
In the study, we uncover the many ways women use to reclaim their relationship with time.
First, women attempt to publicly reject society’s standardised timeline in favour of a personal one. Rather than measuring themselves against the norm (e.g., “I should have had a child by now”), women reframe their journey in terms of their own unique circumstances, detaching their sense of self-worth from society’s reproductive calendar.
For example, another woman in the study explains how the dates of her series of miscarriages and unsuccessful IVFs and their associated due dates spread across her calendar until it became “a minefield”. For her, recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL) meant she had to rethink how she keeps track of things.
Second, women actively attribute meaning and worth to the time spent in fertility treatment, even when it has not yet – or may never – result in a child.
Women recognise courage, endurance and love that drive each attempt.
One woman told us how she still valued the “lost years”, that is, the 5.5 years of trying to conceive because they also reminded her of “the tiny hands I never got to hold”, that of the babies she lost. For her, the time invested in infertility treatment had value in itself. This is a profound reframing in a culture that tends to measure reproductive time only by its outcome.
Third, women allow themselves to create records, rituals, or narratives around the fertility journey and its losses. Women mark failed cycles, lost pregnancies, and difficult milestones not to dwell on failure, but to honour the reality of what they have lived through. This is the case of a woman in the study who memorialised her eight pregnancies (of which six did not result in a child and thus the six white mini pumpkins, pictured).
These stories help us resist the idea that women facing infertility are simply passive victims of circumstances. Rather, we argue, they should be viewed as agents, actively shaping the meaning of their own experiences, even within a system that is often indifferent or hostile to those experiences.
The weight of social silence
Why do so many women feel they have to privately manage this pain in the first place?
Part of the answer lies in what sociologists call the “motherhood mandate”: the persistent idea that motherhood is a natural, expected, almost obligatory stage in a woman’s life, achievable on a relatively predictable timeline.
In France, this pressure remains particularly strong, especially as declining birth rates are increasingly framed as a national concern and political discourse invokes the need for “demographic rearmament”.
Pronatalist policy has long been a pillar of the Republican state, and mothers occupy a central symbolic place in France’s national imagination. This normative model leaves little room for the messy, non-linear reality of fertility struggles.
The idealisation of timely motherhood creates silence around journeys that did not reach their destination on schedule or at all.
Women who have experienced a miscarriage or failed fertility treatment often hesitate to speak about it, for fear of not being understood, or of receiving awkward consolations. Many describe a profound loneliness, compounded by the sense of having fallen behind on a timeline they never agreed to follow.
How can we change things?
What these stories reveal is how much infertility remains private. Women are expected to carry the waiting, the uncertainty, the physical burden of treatment, and the emotional fallout largely on their own, even though the pressures shaping these experiences are deeply social.
Recognising this is the first step towards changing it.
Healthcare providers need to take seriously not only the medical but also the emotional and time burden associated with fertility treatment. Employers need to offer meaningful support for workers undergoing ART.
Friends and family need to learn to sit with discomfort instead of rushing to offer reassurance or simplistic advice. And it means a broader cultural shift away from the idea that a woman’s worth is tied to whether she becomes a mother, and when.
In France, some progress has been made: the 2021 law extending ART to all women broadened access to fertility treatments and fertility preservation.
The official recognition of perinatal grief, including the option to register a stillborn child in the family record book, is an important step. But the structural inequalities in how women’s reproductive time is valued, which we document so clearly in this new research, have barely been touched upon.
A Mother’s Day for everyone
This Mother’s Day, we should celebrate mothers. But we should also encompass women who spent years trying to become one, women in the middle of fertility treatment, women living through miscarriage, and women whose journeys did not end where they hoped they would.
Motherhood is not a single, universal destination reached on a standardised timeline. It is a multitude of paths: some luminous, some terrifying, some that reach their destination and some that stop abruptly in the middle. The women on those harder paths are not behind schedule. They are living their own time. It is past time we recognised it.
This article draws on “Out of Sync with Societal Expectations: How Gendered Consumer Timework Shapes Women’s Experiences in Fertility Services”, authored by Dr Laetitia Mimoun and Dr Lez Trujillo-Torres, published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
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This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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