The terms sterility and infertility are often confused and used as if they were synonyms for a couple's inability to conceive a child. In fact, the two words express distinct concepts: we speak of infertility when a couple is able to conceive but not to carry the pregnancy to term for various reasons (miscarriage, fetal malformations requiring a medical termination of pregnancy, fetal death in utero, and so on); we speak of sterility when a couple, after at least a year of unprotected intercourse, is unable to conceive (primary sterility), or is no longer able to conceive after having carried one or more pregnancies to term.
Pre-primary Sterility
We can define as «pre-primary sterility» the inability of certain women to ever «try» to conceive. This is a situation that is only occasionally linked to pathologies (or the removal) of the reproductive organs: in most cases it concerns healthy women who, in the course of their lives, never had the chance to actually try to fulfill their desire to have a child. Whether single or in a relationship, once these women reach menopause, they mourn the child they can no longer have and wonder whether they would have been capable of becoming mothers. The reasons they never tried to become pregnant are many, and have nothing to do with rejecting motherhood but rather with different life circumstances: very limited or even nonexistent sexual activity, an inability to build a serious, lasting relationship, a pattern of ambivalent, discontinuous relationships incompatible with family life, involvement with married men who would never have left their families, never meeting anyone who engaged them enough to make them want to build a family together, too great an age gap with a partner, fear of facing life as a single mother; or an interest in personal growth and career so intense that it led them to keep postponing any attempt to become pregnant. The goal of fulfilling themselves can push into the background, or at least delay, not only the desire to become mothers but also the search for a suitable partner with whom to conceive a child.
It's almost as if certain women, without realizing it, repeatedly put themselves in situations that prevent them from testing their own capacity to conceive, as if these adverse external circumstances formed a barrier, a defense, able to protect them from an unfounded «fear of failure».
What these women have in common is the depressive state they fall into when menopause arrives, marking the end of any chance to conceive. They often reach this unavoidable appointment with life almost without noticing it, in excellent health, absorbed in engaging, rewarding activities on which they had staked all their energy and expectations.
When menopause arrives, it's as if these women suddenly realize they have irretrievably lost the chance to fulfill a desire they were more or less aware of, because time has run out. In some cases, this realization triggers a profound existential distress which, in truth, doesn't arise at that moment or for that reason alone, but has deep roots that have never been fully faced or worked through.
Roots that go back to childhood, because it is in that period of life that the desire to have a child is born.
A complex desire that involves the little girl's relationship with her parents and with her own femininity; a physiological desire when she lives through an oedipal phase in which the intensity of her aggression toward her mother and her love for her father are not drastically suppressed, because they don't create guilt so strong she cannot bear it; a desire that, in any case, cannot be fulfilled at the moment it arises, and so undergoes a deep repression, meaning it is forgotten and buried within her, though not stripped of its emotional charge. Indeed, when physiological conditions later make its fulfillment possible (starting with adolescence, when the capacity to procreate becomes possible), the ambivalence and intensity that had characterized it resurface and prevent it from being fulfilled.