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........

© The Conversation