The complex lived experience of women with infertility in Ethiopia: An interpretative phenomenologic analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To explore the lived experience of women living with infertility in Ethiopia. METHOD: We used interpretative phenomenologic analysis with open-ended semi-structured questions, focusing on what living with infertility looks like and what that means to the women. Participants included women who had experienced infertility and were following treatment at St. Paul's Hospital Center for Fertility & Reproductive Medicine in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We purposefully recruited 13 women living with infertility and used NVivo version 12 software for data analysis. RESULTS: The study generated six themes: (1) the reason for wanting a child, (2) the financial sacrifice of accessing treatment, (3) infertility and marriage, (4) estrangement and ostracization in social life, (5) psychological despair and support, and (6) faith and resilience. Further analysis identified the superordinate themes: the meaning of a child; lineage and continuity of life; togetherness; marital discord; reduced social participation; being left out of the world, psychological suffering; support and relationship with healthcare providers; helplessness, acceptance, and hope. A child in the Ethiopian context has significant meaning for women and the community. Being unable to accomplish motherhood brings numerous challenges. CONCLUSION: The far-reaching consequences of infertility substantially affect women's psychological, financial, sociocultural, and spiritual lives. However, despite the difficult journey of infertility, women develop coping mechanisms and resilience. Professional psychosocial support is necessary to alleviate the consequences of infertility, yet access to and utilization of these services are inadequate. Infertility needs to receive better attention in the Ethiopian healthcare system as it has significant implications for couples' lives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".