Infertility experience in postmenopausal women: A phenomenological study

 Introduction: Identifying the dimensions of infertility experience in postmenopausal women, would help determining the woman's needs and may lead to appropriate design of intervening strategies in order to improve the quality of their lives. Therefore, this phenomenological study was aimed to evaluate the experience of infertility in postmenopausal women. Materials and Methods: in this phenomenological study, 8 postmenopausal infertile women were evaluated. The inclusion criteria at the time of study were: termination of menstruation for at least one year and have never been pregnant before. Women who were menopause with surgical or medical interventions were excluded. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews. Purposeful sampling was continued until data saturation. Data analysis was performed simultaneously with data collection. To ensure the accuracy of data interpretation, other colleagues also reviewed the data. To determine the validity of the findings, results were returned to some of the participants for further evaluation. Results: According to the codes and categories obtained in this study a main concept of experiences named the mother concept and other eight sub-concepts including the social relations, insecurity, resourcefulness, culture, spirit, cause of infertility, beliefs and barriers to treatment, were extracted.  Conclusions: Infertility is a very important and crucial concept in the life of most women.  Infertility affects many aspects of the women’s life. This situation is more obvious at the end of the child bearing years and beginning of menopause. Studying the dimensions and importance of infertility for postmenopausal women would lead us to the identification of the perspectives and needs of infertile women.