The Silent Suffering: Psychological and Social Impact on Pakistani Women Facing Male-Factor Infertility

Objective

To evaluate the psychological burden of male factor infertility on Pakistani women and their lived experience of stigma, family pressure, marital issues and coping strategies. Methodology: The selected tertiary care hospitals in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, included the gynecology and obstetrics departments, which were included in the cross-sectional convergent mixed method study from January to June 2024. Through purposive sampling 120 female (20-45 years) subjects were selected whose husbands had a clinically diagnosed condition of male infertility. Sociodemographic questions were asked and quantitative data were collected by means of the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21) and the Infertility Stigma Scale (ISS). The twenty respondents were selected for in-depth semi-structured interviews in a purposive sampling. Descriptive statistics, independent-samples t tests, and one-way analysis of variance were used for quantitative data analysis, and for qualitative, the thematic analysis was used.