ABSTRACT
Women’s reproductive decisions are made in the context of extremely complex social messages around mothering, changing social trends related to economic and career trajectories and delayed marriage or partnering and the imperatives and fears unique to the individual biography of every woman. Circumstantial childlessness is produced in the ‘mutual imbrications’ of the psychic and the social in women’s lives; in the ways notions of time, motherhood and femininity are constructed and entangled with women’s conscious and unconscious fantasies, desires, anxieties and ambivalence about becoming mothers and with the limits and possibilities both of female embodiment and of agency around reproductive decision-making in their lives. In this chapter, I draw on a study in which I interviewed 26 women in Aotearoa/New Zealand about their experience of circumstantial childlessness. I used participant-produced drawing alongside semistructured interviews as one means to address this limitation, and here I discuss the ways three of these women utilised the drawing method to articulate an aspect of this experience in visually powerful ways.
