Overcoming the Stigma of Infertility in Zimbabwe

Michelle Bradt

Sept 1, 2006

Current Events 3


In an article entitled “Overcoming the Stigma of Infertility in Zimbabwe,” Peggy Cohen describes the efforts of a woman named Betty Chishava to erase the seriously held and committed to idea of pronatalism that prevails in Zimbabwe. Chishava, after caring for her sick husband for several years both financially and physically, was kicked out of her own home and divorced because she was thought to be infertile. In fact, her husband had gone through several medical tests which proved he had a low sperm count. The stigma is so overburdening for women, however, that even if it is proven to be the man’s fault, women are blamed. Often infertile women are seen as useless in all aspects of society, being turned away from jobs and by their own families if they cannot produce offspring.

Chishava has been working in Zimbabwe to combat this ideology and plague for women. She has had workshops and meetings to help counsel women (and some infertile men, who, if they even tell the truth about themselves, are seen less as men and are sometimes buried with dead rats in their graves to symbolize this) and to teach them how to make livings for themselves. She is very dedicated to the drama team she started to help member of her organization cope with the various forms of infertility, with a play that focuses on the repercussions of negative attitudes from society toward women who are infertile, or who are labeled infertile.

This article was not written very recently (in June of 2001, in fact), but it illuminates a problem that is going on worldwide still today: women are being valued only insofar as they are able to be mothers, wives, and family care-takers. Indeed, in Zimbabwe as well as in other countries, even a woman’s job skills are not valued if she can’t produce children to take the earnings later on of those skills. Women are an important and vital part of today’s global economy, and to ignore their worth as individuals and participants in that economy is to negate the value of half the world’s market contributors. So whether one looks at this from a humanist or economic perspective, something needs to be done about the proliferation of pronatalism in today’s world.


June 2001. Ashoka’s Changemakers online. http://www.changemakers.net/journal/01june/sango.cfm