According to the United Nations (1995), Reproductive Health affects the lives of both men and women in all matters related to the reproductive system and its functions and processes, and it implies not only that people are able to have a satisfactory life without taking sexual risks but are also able to have the ability of giving birth and the liberty of deciding when and how often.
Given the scale and the role that gender variable has in the framing of the society and its impact on the health of men and women, the research conducted into the field of reproductive health also are advancing and promoting policies that recognize its importance. Human reproduction is a complex biological process bound by social development, in which not just sex but gender also determines the psychological health of the men and women who affront the process of infertility. The publication of scholarly research on the infertility experience has grown in the past years but the evidence about the importance of gender for the experience of infertility is much more scarce.
The chapter “Health and Gender Perspective in Infertility” aims to contribute to current evidence on the determinants of health in infertility by integrating the gender approach. The chapter discloses how men and women are coping with experience of infertility, individually or as a couple, and analyzes the psychological valence that the social discourse on fertility/ /infertility has for men and women, thus contributing current evidence on the determinants of health by integrating the gender approach.
In short, the chapter underlines the need to fully implement an gender approach to reproductive health includes all of the well-known health factors and not only those concerning human sexual and reproductive conduct. Gender, never so much as in reproductive health, will be transformed into a powerful determinant of health capable of explaining how sexual differences become social inequality.
For more information see: Limiñana-Gras, R. M. (2017). Health and Gender Perspective in Infertility. In M. P. Sánchez-López & R. M. Limiñana-Gras, The Psychology of Gender and Health. Conceptual and Applied Global Concerns. San Diego: Elsevier.
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