Desire for Children and Anxiety About Infertility

Desire for Children and Anxiety About Infertility is both the emotional engine of Eva and Peter’s struggle to become parents and the pressure that turns an intimate wish into a conflict over reproductive choice. Their early hope survives repeated disappointments and clinical tests, but it also narrows sex into a scheduled task. Later, Eva’s fear of losing her chance to conceive leads her to pursue Steef’s sperm through a concealed plan, a decision that she experiences as hope and Steef condemns as theft. The concept therefore joins grief and longing to a harder question: whose consent counts when the desire for a child becomes overwhelming?

Hope, Disappointment, and the Body

After the loss of Lieve, trying for another child initially feels to Eva and Peter like beginning again. They have sex almost daily and imagine that each encounter might have made a baby. Eva’s nausea and attention to her breasts seem to confirm pregnancy; the Predictor pregnancy tests repeatedly end that expectation, sometimes after a faint blue line gives way to bleeding. Hope is not absent from the process, but it is repeatedly made provisional: each bodily sign can be read as promise, then undone.

The first response from their general practitioner is reassurance rather than referral. After a year of trying, he tells them that half of couples are pregnant by then and half are not, and sees no immediate reason for alarm given their health and age. He recommends taking temperatures to help identify the fertile period. The advice offers a practical next step, but it also starts converting spontaneous intimacy into a measured routine.

Eva records her basal temperature every morning at half past six, before the alarm. A rise of 0.2 degrees Celsius suggests that ovulation may be near, and sex is organized around that information. Peter describes the process as hurried and instrumental: foreplay is cut short, morning kisses are unwelcome, and he is expected to ejaculate quickly enough for both of them to get to work. The calendar turns their shared desire into a task with a narrow window, while leaving the rest of the month largely without sex.

Medical Treatment and Marital Strain

The prospect of fertility treatment exposes a difference between wanting a child and accepting the means of pursuing one. After a serious argument, Peter says that he wants a child with Eva but wishes it could come from love rather than from a laboratory procedure. He also admits that the new sexual routine has made him miss the relationship they had before trying to conceive. Eva hears his resistance as betrayal and abandonment. Her longing is so consuming, she explains, that giving up is not a simple option; she also argues that a treatable medical problem might be found, making refusal to investigate it senseless.

They return to the doctor and receive a referral. The gynaecologist finds no obvious abnormality in Eva: her temperature curve indicates monthly ovulation, and an ultrasound shows no blockage, cysts, or inflammation in her uterus or ovaries. The investigations then shift attention to Peter. He must abstain from ejaculation for five days before providing a semen sample, and later repeats the test. Both results show too few sperm and poor movement among those present. The clinical finding changes the couple’s difficulty from uncertainty into a diagnosis of male-factor infertility, and leaves medical assistance as their remaining route to a child.

The tests make Peter’s body part of the struggle, but they do not resolve the emotional imbalance between the couple. Eva’s wish remains urgent while Peter is increasingly uneasy about the treatment process and the sex it has reorganized. The desired child is at once a shared hope and a source of estrangement: the more methodically they pursue conception, the less their sexual relationship resembles the intimacy Peter says he misses.

From Longing to a Concealed Plan

Later, the possibility of conception through Steef emerges from Eva and Rebecca’s decision to arrange a partner-swapping encounter around Eva’s next ovulation. Rebecca calls the approach soft coercion; the plan is to calculate the fertile period, meet the two men, and try again if the first attempt does not succeed. When Eva asks about contraception, Rebecca says the condom could leak. Their private objective is not simply sexual novelty: Eva wants Steef’s semen, while the men have not been brought into the plan to conceive a child.

On the morning of the encounter, Eva watches Peter over breakfast and thinks of him as more beautiful and desirable than ever. She knows he will soon have sex with another woman, and is nervous about going through with it, yet determined not to back out. Rebecca’s claim that allowing a partner to enjoy someone else is a supreme expression of love sits beside Eva’s unease. The scene gives the ideal of open sexual generosity a second meaning: the encounter is also being used to create a pregnancy whose purpose has not been disclosed to the men.

Eva prepares her body with painstaking attention, shaving herself and comparing herself unfavorably with Rebecca. She has bought lingerie and body lotion, but her thoughts turn toward Steef and the way she imagines he might admire her. Once the encounter begins, however, the preparation does not produce ease or pleasure. Eva feels detached from herself, smiles tensely, and tries to keep the goal in view. The sexual contact feels mechanical; she watches Peter touch Rebecca without feeling the jealousy she expects, and cannot lose herself in what is happening. Rebecca’s tenderness and attentiveness help guide the encounter, but Eva remains acutely conscious of each action and of her own inexperience.

When Eva sees Steef’s response to the leaking condom, the hidden stakes become impossible for her to ignore. She tells Rebecca that this may be her only chance and fears that neither Peter nor Steef will agree to do it again. Rebecca urges her to focus on the larger purpose: the possibility of becoming a mother. In the aftermath, Eva calculates the odds of pregnancy, weighing the possibility of conception against miscarriage and the likely damage to her marriage. She recognizes that Peter is miserable and Steef has left angry, yet describes herself as sealed off from those consequences. Her desire has become a narrow, self-protective focus on the chance that a child might result.

The Pill and Conflicting Claims to Choice

The morning after the encounter, Steef brings Eva a box of morning-after pills from a night pharmacy. He apologizes for his reaction to the condom accident and says that intimacy with Eva made him less careful than he would have been with a stranger. He distinguishes that intimacy from being in love, but tells her that she is more than just a body to him. His explanation makes the encounter emotionally complicated without altering the fact that Eva has a private reason to preserve the possibility of pregnancy.

Steef says that he does not want another child. He describes Sem as having arrived against his will and says that, despite trying to be a good father, he considers himself too unstable and too attached to his freedom. He asks Eva to take the pills, arguing that it is unacceptable for a child to come from the situation and that the medication is 95 percent certain to prevent pregnancy. Eva tells him she will take it after breakfast, while inwardly wishing to retain the small chance of carrying his child. The exchange brings two incompatible claims into the same kitchen: Steef’s wish not to become a father again and Eva’s hope that the encounter might make her a mother.

When Steef later confronts Rebecca, he names the arrangement as a violation. He says that his semen was stolen with his wife’s consent and calls what the women did criminal. He insists that he does not want the child and argues that children need a father, drawing on his own account of fatherhood and his reluctance to take on another child. The confrontation makes plain what Eva’s desperation had obscured: wanting a child does not itself authorize using another person’s reproductive capacity without informed agreement. At the same time, the novel has already shown how infertility and grief can make an uncertain opportunity feel to Eva like the only one she will ever have.

Pregnancy as Hope and Irreversible Decision

By the time Eva examines her body again, her swollen, painful breasts recall her pregnancy with Lieve. She is nearly certain she is pregnant, though the test has not yet confirmed it; she plans to take one with Rebecca at school. The remembered bodily signs revive an earlier desire that reaches beyond a positive test. Eva recalls wanting to feel a living child grow inside her and imagining the recognition, attachment, and unconditional love of motherhood. Her longing predates the plan involving Steef, but the chance of fulfilling it now carries the consequences of that plan.

Eva’s decision is explicit: she will keep the child, and she insists that this child will live. The declaration contrasts with the calculations and negotiations that have preceded it. She accepts the possibility of leaving her home and a marriage she describes as a life of pain, even though she fears being alone and does not know what lies ahead. The desire for a child has moved from a shared project with Peter, through medical diagnosis and concealed conception, to a decision Eva claims for herself. Yet the choice is not free of conflict: Steef rejects fatherhood, Peter and Eva’s marriage is in deep distress, and the means of conception have denied Steef informed consent. The longing at the center of the story remains powerful precisely because its hope and its harm cannot be separated.