the havoc infertility wreaks on women

27 Sep, 2026

In an inversion of how we like to project our fears and desires onto celebrities, the art we create is a mirror of our lived reality. Even when we create stories about aliens, the far future, or fantasize about alternate ways of existing, our subconscious perception of the world still leaks in. How we perceive femininity and view the female body is one of the things that are a constant site of contention in media. Despite what the Right wants us to believe and its many wins in the last century or so, feminism has not gone nearly far enough. Pregnancy and the ability to become pregnant are still the defining metrics of what it means to be a “real” woman, especially judging by how the inability to become pregnant or complications during pregnancy present a tipping point for women that completely derails their character—fictional or not.

Spoiler Warning

The following contains spoilers for the Apple TV+ shows Silo and Severance and the HBO show Sex and the City. For Silo, I’ll mainly be discussing the first episode after which the spotlit character dies, but my discussion will include revelations from later episodes. As for Severance, the female character I’ll be discussing gains significance relevant to this post in the latter half of season two, so major spoilers ahead. As for Sex and the City, what I’ll be discussing happens between seasons four and six.

The first example I’d like to discuss is Allison Becker from the Apple TV+ show Silo. The show is a TV adaptation of the Silo book series by Hugh Howey—which doesn’t include nearly as much depth on Allison’s character as the show—which follows a future society that is stuck living underground because of a devastated Earth. The people underground don’t know why they’re there, who built the silo,¹ or why the Earth is devastated. Because of scarce resources and limited space, there is a lottery for selecting who gets to procreate. Allison Becker, a very talented IT worker, and her husband Holston Becker, the silo sheriff, get selected for the third time to have a baby. Following that, her birth control is removed at the clinic and they have sex every day. In their desperation to become parents, they follow every nonsensical health myth, yet despite both of them being healthy, Allison doesn’t become pregnant.

A self-styled fertility counselor, Gloria Hildebrandt, who claims to have experienced the same with her husband and the lottery, tries to educate Allison on why the state may not want people like her to procreate. Allison is the kind of person who asks lots of taboo questions just like Gloria is of a line of people who carry the memory of life outside the silo with them—another taboo. Allison starts digging for clues on why the silo really doesn’t remember the world before the silo, what happened at the rebellion 140 years before the events in the show, and whether the rebels were really the ones to blame for the forgetting (they weren’t). Being the talented IT woman she is, she helps George Wilkins, a dissident, recover purged data—during Freedom Day that celebrates the failure of the rebellion 140 years ago, no less—from a 140-year-old hard drive relic that contains a video of someone who goes out to clean the sensors, either from being sentenced to death for a crime or because they expressed the wish to go out—which is final—, where they see lush trees, green prairies, blue skies, and birds instead of the dead and desolate view on the cafeteria screen.

This shakes Allison to the core. What if the state is not only lying about the state of the world outside, but also about who really gets to procreate like Gloria says? She goes home and tells no one about this. This happens the day before her birth control is reinstated. Come morning, she doesn’t show up at the clinic at the agreed-upon time. Her husband gives up the wait and goes looking for her. Holston finds her in their apartment, bleeding. She tells him how they’ve both been lied to about the birth control which she holds in her hand, having removed it herself from her hip with a kitchen knife. Holston panics and runs to get a doctor. In the meantime, Allison climbs the stairs to the cafeteria on level one and begins yelling to everyone eating there how the screen is a lie just like the lottery. She is in a state of delirium from blood loss, exacerbated by exertion from climbing over a dozen levels, and screaming at people how everything is a lie. She then breaks the one, hardline taboo: She asks to go outside. As they’re getting her ready with a suit, she assures her husband that the world outside is safe and that she will come back for him.

The world outside isn’t safe and the suit doesn’t protect her. Allison dies. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a kernel of truth to her suspicions, but she was as gullible as the system she grew up in wanted her to be. She jumped at the first piece of “evidence” that disproved what she wanted disproved: that the world outside was devastated and the lottery was fair. Her failure to fulfill her primary bodily function sent her down a rabbit hole with uncritical questioning of whatever evidence she may find because she wasn’t mentally in a spot where critical thinking could counteract her very legitimate doubts. Being so violated that she was made to distrust her body made her distrust the system as a whole. While she wasn’t wrong to distrust a system built on lies, coercion, and misogyny, she lacked the tools to verify the evidence. One could argue that her asking to go out was her verifying the evidence, but Allison, up until the very end, believed that the illusion shown in her suit’s visor was the truth and not the screen in the cafeteria. Till the very end, she operated within the system oppressing her because she fatally glossed over the possibility that the lies could be layers upon layers stacked on top of each other.

This can be read as a metaphor for misogyny and the system enforcing it, patriarchy, with how insidious and hard it is to combat. It is so deep inside our psyche that even the act of questioning it relies on relying on some parts of it as anchors of reality. In a way, Allison couldn’t have done it because her “movement” was so fragmented and there was no way of communicating her findings for deconstructing its next layer. Her sacrifice in seeking knowledge unleashes a series of events that eventually uncovers more lies, including how what she experienced was a tool to ensure social cohesion. You might be wondering: Wouldn’t that make people like the various right-wing women with similar experiences that lead them down a misguided path seem like martyrs for a good cause? Not really. It matters how you channel your anger at the system, but the initial impulse still counts. Unlike Allison Becker, many such women in the real world were wronged and did the best to their knowledge and ability to help others instead of choosing self-destruction. Sometimes people fuck up, but our society cultivated a shitty media system that expands the reach of controversial figures over uncontroversial, everyday actors doing feminist and inclusive activism, spreading awareness of misogyny and intersectional oppression as opposed to spreading medical misinformation.

The next character I would like to discuss is Gemma Scout from Severance. Mark Scout, the main protagonist of the show, is devastated after his wife’s death in a car accident. He decides to undergo the severance procedure which would make him a different person while at work at Lumon, a large corporation with tentacles enclosing every aspect of life (medicine, employment, housing, education, and politics). He would forget the pain of losing her while he performed a job that kept him afloat as the loss made him incapable of performing his previous job as a history professor. I don’t need to get into the weeds of what severance means for the workplace when there are write-ups like this one by Coyote on the internet. Instead, I want to focus on Gemma Scout herself.

Based on how affected Mark was by Gemma’s death, we as the viewers can already assume that they were extremely close prior to the accident. We know very little about Gemma until episode seven of season two. We learn how the two meet at a Lumon blood donation facility, what Gemma means to people other than Mark, and what a source of conflict pregnancy is for the couple. Initially, Mark as well as Gemma are excited to become parents. Overeager even, judging by how Mark rushes to buy a baby bed that “is on sale” before Gemma even becomes pregnant. Eventually, Gemma becomes pregnant and miscarries. This becomes the turning point for her: She wants to become pregnant at all costs, almost as if she wants to prove a point. The couple tries IVF three times (at a facility run by Lumon) to no avail with Mark always reminding Gemma that they don’t have to do this, that they could always adopt. Gemma doesn’t listen. She insists on continuing to try, even though it is obvious how much the injections and the lack of success are affecting her.

IVF is a very expensive and straining procedure on the body, patient’s mental health, and partnered life overall. All that doesn’t stop Gemma from trying not once or twice, but three times. Gemma Scout isn’t an uneducated woman. She is a university professor (of Russian literature) just like her husband, yet she still can’t resist not doing everything in her power to fulfill her “purpose.” To me, this hints at something deeper that she’s unable to overcome: Her fear of what it means to be an infertile woman with a “broken” body incapable of spawning life into the world. It exposes how detrimental the understanding of the female body as the factory of life is to the female psyche and how vulnerable that makes an infertile woman to what Lumon—representing the exploitative, capitalist order—does to her and consequently her husband.

The last character I would like to look at is Charlotte York from the HBO show Sex and the City because I find that this would nicely tie the other characters back to conservatism. Sex and the City is a comedic drama following four initially single women resisting societal ideals of femininity to prove their worth as people. Each woman symbolizes a kind of white woman in American cities with Charlotte York being the woman with conservative ideals of “having made it” in life. She wants to get married to Prince Charming, have kids, and settle down into domestic life. She finds him in season three, then soon gets divorced because of various incompatibilities in their sexual and marital lives. However, not before trying to procreate.

Charlotte York is, in her own words, “reproductively challenged” which means she’s infertile.² She tries IVF which throws her completely off. Her marriage is already strained for various reasons, so the stress of IVF only adds fuel to the fire. Again, her husband recognizes that he is losing her and her friends are at a loss for how to help her, but Charlotte insists on still trying IVF until her marriage falls apart completely. She ends up marrying—you guessed it—her divorce lawyer Harry Goldenblatt who she is very upfront with about her reproductive “shortcomings” because, like her, he wants a family. She converts to his faith, Judaism, because she finally found a man who would accept an infertile woman. This was partially a projection because she herself wouldn’t accept her infertility. He is completely fine with adoption, she isn’t. Struggling with her self-worth after abandoning her work to dedicate herself to marital, domestic life, Charlotte York has the most pronounced internalized misogyny out of every character I’ve discussed so far with how much she outright hates herself for being infertile.

She tries IVF again which doesn’t work so she falls for the myth that acupuncture would get her pregnant. Coincidentally, she does get pregnant but miscarries soon after. As she desperately wants to prove that she would be a capable mother, she adopts a dog until she figures out what to do next. When her female dog is impregnated after a short dog orgy at the park and gives birth months later, she freaks out. How could a dog perform her female duty of procreation better than her? Why does her body not work for what it was designed to do?

While Charlotte expands her performance of womanhood with Fordist female aesthetics of domestic life while delegating the breadwinner role to her husband, she isn’t much different from the other characters who despite occupying social roles equal to (Gemma) or better than (Allison) their husbands still suffered the same crisis leading to their unraveling from the same root cause—(internalized) misogyny. The tight attachment of fertility to female self-worth is the only plausible explanation for why hurdles on the path to pregnancy and pregnancy itself became such radical tipping points in these women’s lives.

Assuming media is a projection of society as it is, it shouldn’t be surprising why far-right ideologues have such a chokehold on so many women despite their ideology being directly harmful to them. It instrumentalizes the latent misogyny present in everyone’s subconsciousness to move women back into the niche carved out for them under patriarchy. It abuses a structural vulnerability of their self-worth to discredit them, punish them, and discard them when they don’t live up to the arbitrary expectations placed upon them. It is only so easy because many women are convinced that it is their existential duty to further a man’s bloodline and struggle to imagine an alternative path to parenting for themselves because it would preclude the admission that they “failed.”

We’ve made large strides towards a feminist society, but we will remain so far away from one for as long as fertility and reproduction are such central pillars of what it means to be a woman.