ABSTRACT
This section deals with stories—the place where all human affairs, identities, meaning, and politics ultimately reside. It makes the point that even science is a story developed by certain actors at a given historical time and, as such, always reflects specific interests. In this respect, the analysis provides a preliminary reason why the story of involuntary childlessness is widely unheard of: when it comes to studies of (in)fertility there is a gap in research—a “missing story.” The existential and human dimensions of not having children are largely unaddressed in a scholarly context that tends to approach childlessness through large-scale quantitative demographic studies and from a clinical perspective. The most direct way to fill this gap for the childless investigator—the only one who is able to identify what is in fact absent in research—is to speak out about what she knows from the perspective of her personal story. The section thus makes a case for the use of one’s lived experience—auto-ethnography—against those quarters of academia that would regard it as problematic in the (erroneous) belief that the “personal” is antithetic to the “objectivity” to which science should aspire.
