As a community-engaged scholar, my research collaborates with communities. I believe that interventional scholarship requires collaborative partnerships among scholars, communities, and the people whom they advocate for. This position is informed by my own experience with infertility and my ongoing participation in infertility advocacy organizations and reproductive health communities.

Frustrated by the predominant silence and stigma surrounding infertility, I became determined not only to openly discuss my experiences with infertility but also to encourage other infertile women and men to do the same. Committed to the need to talk about infertility and the ways in which infertility reorients one’s understanding of their body, cultural expectations, and personal desires, I founded a peer-led support group for people experiencing infertility. My advocacy work has since expanded to include state and national efforts focused on equitable access to fertility care and family building. I am a founding member of the Building Families Alliance of Wisconsin and currently serve on its Steering Committee, helping advance statewide advocacy for equitable access to fertility care and family-building support. I am also a member of State Strong, a multi-state coalition working to advance fertility access and family-building policy. At the national level, I serve as a lay reviewer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)’s Patient Education Programming and as a member of RESOLVE: The National Infertility and Family Building Association’s Community Advisory Committee. I have also participated in RESOLVE’s Advocacy Day and other advocacy efforts that bring members of the infertility community together to advocate for expanded access to fertility care.

My infertility advocacy work is directly connected to my affiliation with The ART of Infertility, an international art, portraiture, and oral history project and traveling art exhibition. Founded in 2014 by women experiencing infertility, the organization has conducted hundreds of interviews, curated innovative art exhibitions, hosted writing and art workshops, and maintained a blog and social media presence within the infertility community. Through these activities, we explore how individuals represent their experiences with infertility through creative outlets such as writing, art, and other multimodal forms. Several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in fields including medical humanities, technical communication, and rhetoric have been published on the significance of this work. In 2023, we published Infertilities, A Curation (Wayne State University Press), which makes visible the emotional depths of infertility and reveals that infertility cannot be reduced to a singular narrative; instead, it is an assemblage of multiple embodied moments.

The ART of Infertility’s mission is to break the silence around the experiences of infertil­ity, offering art and storytelling as therapeutic heuristics to capture and express the realities, pains, and joys of infertility. This project recognizes the diverse voices and per­spectives that represent infertility – ranging from those in a heterosexual relationship who receive an infertility diagnosis upon trying to conceive, those who identify as single-mothers-by-choice and undergoing fertility treatment to become pregnant, and those who identify as LGBTQ+ and encounter many of the same infertility decisions. In this way, the project attempts to speak back to dominant perceptions and assumptions of who is infertile. Our goal in doing so is to broaden the public’s understandings of infertility, making the claim that infertility impacts far more than just the older heterosexual couple attempting to conceive.

In November of 2018, The ART of Infertility was recognized by RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association and received The Hope Award for Innovation. You can learn more about the award and why the recognition of storytelling is important when dealing with infertility in the video below. 

To learn more about The ART of Infertility, go to our website: www.artofinfertility.org. You can also see a small, virtual exhibit curated for National Infertility Awareness Week during April 2020 by clicking here.