'Falling down the rabbit hole': The construction of infertility by news media

Objective: The purpose of this study is to investigate how Canadian print news frames infertility. Background: The way the media frames issues can affect the public's interpretation of those issues. News coverage often frames health issues as highly alarming with few coping strategies, which tends to elicit fear, worry and avoidance, but no increase in issue knowledge or personal efficacy regarding the health issue. The present study will investigate the framing of infertility-related print news with respect to alarm, coping, medicalisation, genderisation, and identified causes/solutions. Methods: A content analysis was conducted on Canadian print news articles that contained the key word 'infertility' in the year 2012 (N = 157). Two independent raters analysed the articles using a pre-determined coding strategy. Results: Just over half of the articles employed alarm frames, and the vast majority of these met the criteria for categorisation as high alarm. The most commonly cited cause of infertility was delayed childbearing and the most frequently presented way to cope with infertility was in vitro fertilisation. Infertility was most often constructed as a women's issue. Conclusion: Canadian print news media tends to present an alarming portrayal of infertility that adheres to a biomedical perspective that often conflates infertility with involuntary childlessness.