La infertilidad como enfermedad y como experiencia de vida

Abstract

Infertility as a problem that couples face during their reproductive stage of their lives. It has the potential to affect strong the identity of the ones involved; their personal self-steem, their relationships with their partners and social context. This phenomenon has been addressed essentially by biomedicine and psychology, disciplines that have achieved important advances in knowledge. The biomedicine perspective has developed therapeutic procedures for this conditions using high technology, and psychology has dealt with the experiences at an emotional and personal level. However, the bibliography of the topic revealed that very little research of the problem has been don’t in Mexico from an anthropological viewpoint. Thus, there is a gap addressing infertility as a life experience in different cultures. This cannot be avoided any long. In addition, there are conceptual confusions in the literature between sterility and sterility and its borderline is not clear in many instances. This paper discusses the contributions to and the limitations of biomedicine and psychology; takes a view of the concepts of infertility and sterility emphasizing that there are two different conditions within human biological variability concluding that its impact on individuals and couples should be viewed different and, thus needs to be researched an anthropological point of view.