Experiencing Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Digital Age

As having children is considered an inherent stage in family development, inability to procreate can be considered as a crisis on both a family and an individual level. Receiving infertility treatment is also a life event that may result in significant emotional distress as well as long-term embeddedness into a professional, medical context. Thus it is equally imperative to concentrate not only on how patients experience their own childlessness, but how they perceive their successful or unsuccessful treatments within the medicalized and institutionalized 21^st century.

Present paper (funded by OTKA-K108981) investigates everyday life experiences of infertile women who have decided to seek medical treatments which employ assisted reproductive technologies (grounded in a volatile relationship with the health care facilities), based on a systematic and in-depth qualitative analysis of topic related on-line discussion group messages. A central focus is on how the participants make sense of their conditions and treatments, what questions they find worthy of discussing and how they communicate among their own internet community. Theories of individual construction of technologies, concepts of the changing doctor-patient role and theories of rising consumerist attitude guided the research, focusing on the ART treatment within the context of the Hungarian health care system. The research investigated the constructions, tones, themes, portrayed topics and problems of the individual contributors, focusing on the newly evolving patient-doctor relationship, whilst not neglecting the dynamics of the online group.

This unique research design permitted studying the discourse of the participants in a natural, non-controlled environment, where the presence of the researcher had no influence on the results.

Main findings suggest that while lay expertise and condition based knowledge is rising in the digital age, the supremacy of trust towards medical professionals and institutionalized medicine is fading, a new dynamics in attitudes towards treatments is emerging as we speak.