Beyond the body: Social, structural, and environmental infertility.

Infertility is often thought of as a disease of the male or female reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular, unprotected sexual intercourse. However, as fertility rates rapidly decline worldwide, we observe that the inability to conceive and have children stems not only from anatomical, physiological, or genetic conditions within the body but also from social, structural, and environmental conditions in society. Drawing on a wide array of international and interdisciplinary scholarship, this article rethinks infertility by focusing on the social, structural, and environmental conditions hindering the ability of individuals and couples to have children and become parents.

Gendered employment trajectories and later life health in liberal regime countries: A quantitative study in the United States, England, Switzerland and Chile.

We explore the association between adulthood employment patterns and later life health among men and women in four liberal regime countries: two from Europe (England and Switzerland) and two from the Americas (United States and Chile). We carefully harmonized life-history data from the surveys SHARE (N = 1,143), HRS (N = 4,006), ELSA (N = 3,083), and EVDA (N = 802). The samples included individuals born between 1944 and 1954, with information on employment histories from age 15 to 65 and on 11 health outcomes in later life.

Making it work: How women negotiate labor market participation after the transition to motherhood.

The increasing participation of women in the labor market coexists with traditional gender roles and a social division of labor that reproduces the feminization of childcare and housework. Reconciling the contradictions between work and family life has become one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary female life course. In this article, I analyze the strategies through which women in Santiago de Chile negotiate their participation in the labor market after the transition to motherhood using qualitative data produced through 28 in-depth life story interviews.

"It's hard to become mothers": The moral economy of postponing motherhood in neoliberal Chile.

The delay of childbearing is one of the most prominent transformations of contemporary fertility and reproductive patterns. This article provides a novel approach to understanding why women are postponing motherhood and having children later in life. Drawing on 24 life story interviews with women from Santiago de Chile, I argue that the transition to motherhood is shaped by a moral economy in which women postpone childbearing to enable becoming "good" mothers.