Abstract

Infertility affects one in six couples—more than ten million people in the United States alone. Yet this enormous medical, psychological, and social problem continues to be neglected. Beth Cooper-Hilbert's Infertility and Involuntary Childlessness refocuses attention on this pervasive problem and is intended to educate psychotherapists. The book is aimed less at those who specialize in work with infertile couples than at therapists with general outpatient practices who could benefit themselves and their patients by acquiring a clearer understanding of the multiple traumas of infertility and the specific counseling issues that attend them. Dr. Cooper-Hilbert is a psychologist in private practice and director of the Fertility Counseling Center of Connecticut. In addition, she teaches psychology and marriage and family therapy courses at two Connecticut universities. She is certainly well qualified to write this book, and, based on her writing, I wouldn't hesitate to refer to her any couple struggling with past or current infertility issues. Unfortunately, her attempts to provide a comprehensive guide for therapists are somewhat uneven. The author presents infertility as a crisis within the development of the marital life cycle, which is a useful and well-researched paradigm, but I was left wondering about the place of