What is infertility?
Infertility is usually defined as involuntary failure to conceive after one year of unprotected sexual intercourse. In its wider sense, infertility refers to couples who are having difficulty achieving parenthood and would, therefore, include pregnancy problems such as recurrent miscarriage (Q12.9). Between 80-90% of couples who will achieve a pregnancy without assistance, succeed within the first year of unprotected intercourse and about 95% within two years. The central theme of biology is reproduction, and for those unfortunate couples who have difficulty achieving parenthood there may be feelings including anxiety, frustration and despair.
Primary infertility usually refers to patients with no history of a successful pregnancy. Secondary infertility indicates that there has been a previous successful pregnancy. It may also be appropriate to consider whether the infertility is primary or secondary for each partner as well as for the current partnership.
Infertility is perceived as a disease by less than half of people surveyed (38%), in contrast to the accepted medical opinion; (ii) awareness about the definition and incidence of infertility is relatively low, despite the fact that half of the people polled claimed to know someone affected by infertility.(2000-01)
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