Infertility and the Struggle to Have Children

Infertility and the Struggle to Have Children is a defining pressure on Peter and Eva’s marriage: the desire to become parents first gives their life together a renewed sense of possibility, then turns intimacy into a timetable of ovulation and tests, and finally becomes inseparable from the loss of their daughter, Lieve. The novel makes infertility more than a medical obstacle. It is also an unequal distribution of physical risk, a dispute over the limits of treatment, and a conflict over who has the right to decide how a child might be conceived.

From shared hope to scheduled sex

At first, the decision to try for a child feels to Peter like a new beginning. He is unsure whether he truly wants parenthood, but he knows he wants to remain with Eva, and her wish to carry his child reassures him. The couple immediately abandon contraception and approach conception with urgency and excitement. After sex, they imagine that they may have succeeded; moonlight falling across Eva’s body becomes, in Peter’s hopeful interpretation, a sign of a magical moment they will one day describe to their child.

The repeated tests make that hope precarious. Eva sometimes feels nauseous or reads signs of pregnancy in her body, but the Predictor pregnancy tests disappoint them. A faint second line, when they think they see one, is followed by bleeding. After a year, they ask their family doctor for referral to a gynecologist. He initially considers their age and health reassuring, notes that many couples have not conceived after a year, and advises them to help nature along by tracking Eva’s temperature.

The thermometer and basal temperature chart bring a new precision to their private life. Eva takes her temperature at half past six each morning and records it; a rise of two-tenths of a degree signals that ovulation may be near. Sex is then organized around the chance of conception. Peter describes foreplay being cut short and Eva wanting neither prolonged kissing nor delay: the priority is ejaculation before they have to leave for work. The practice gives their attempts a schedule, but it also replaces the spontaneity and closeness Peter misses.

Diagnosis and the medical burden

Six months of temperature-guided attempts intensify the disagreement. After a serious argument, Peter tells Eva he does not want to enter the medical process. He wants a child conceived through love rather than in a laboratory, and he misses the relationship they had before trying to conceive took over their sex life. For him, intercourse on a few fertile days followed by abstinence for the rest of the month has made the couple feel estranged from one another.

Eva experiences his resistance as abandonment. Her desire for a child is so consuming that she cannot simply stop trying, and she argues that investigating a possible, treatable problem could be worthwhile. The next morning they obtain a referral. At the first appointment, the gynecologist finds no apparent abnormality in Eva: her temperature chart suggests regular ovulation, and an ultrasound shows no blockages, cysts, or inflammation in her uterus or ovaries. Blood is drawn, and Peter is asked to provide a semen sample after five days without ejaculation.

The tests identify a male-factor problem. Both semen examinations reach the same result: Peter has too few sperm, and those present move very poorly. The account makes the diagnosis concrete through the awkward procedures Peter undergoes, including masturbating in a small, dark room over well-used magazines and later to a pornographic video, then handing over the sample. The implication is consequential: the couple are told that medical treatment is their remaining route to a child. Infertility is not located in Eva’s reproductive organs, yet her body will bear much of what follows.

Treatment, loss, and unequal grief

By the time the couple discuss their history in therapy with Hetty, their attempts have accumulated into nine IVF cycles, four ICSI treatments, and five KID attempts. Peter argues that the treatment has gone far enough. He cannot bear to watch Eva’s healthy body suffer for his sperm abnormality, and he understands the burial of Lieve as the point at which they also buried their shared dream of another child. The donor conception that made Lieve possible does not lessen her place in their family, but it sharpens Peter’s pain: he describes her as a daughter who was not biologically his and expresses hatred toward the unknown donor.

Their grief does not proceed in step. Peter tells Hetty that he is no longer preoccupied with the loss every day; he and Eva have made new friends, he listens to music again, and he rides his motorcycle. He believes they have found a new balance, yet therapy repeatedly brings the past back into view. Hetty interprets his apparent recovery differently, arguing that he has lost both a child and the hope of having another, and that he suppresses his grief because he assumes Eva has a greater claim to it. Her account identifies how Peter’s wish to spare Eva can also prevent him from confronting his own loss.

The grave makes that imbalance visible. Lieve is buried in the children’s section beneath a white stone, among forget-me-nots, toys, and brightly colored flowers. The nearby sports fields bring the sound of living children into a place of mourning. Eva maintains the grave; Peter, who has avoided it since the funeral, eventually visits and places a white rose by the stone. He feels guilt rather than the love he thinks he ought to feel for a child he never had the chance to know. On another visit, Eva silently tends the flowers while Peter waters them and holds her hand. He recognizes his jealousy of the depth of her grief for Lieve, a dead baby who remains the greatest love of her life.

For Eva, continuing to live does not mean forgetting that she is Lieve’s mother. After realizing that she has gone several hours without thinking of her daughter, she is frightened by the possibility that relief might amount to betrayal. She returns to the photograph of Lieve in a knitted sweater and the quilt Eva made, and keeps a candle beside it. The memory is at once a source of pain and a bond she refuses to surrender. Her work among young children offers distraction, but their noise and vitality also make the contrast with her stillborn daughter unmistakable.

Renewed attempts and contested consent

The desire for a child returns in a more ethically fraught form through Eva and Rebecca’s plan to conceive with Steef. Rebecca proposes what she calls soft coercion: they will time the attempt for Eva’s ovulation and let the encounter happen, repeating it if necessary. When Eva asks about a condom, Rebecca suggests that it could leak. The plan treats conception as a way around the barriers Peter’s infertility and the couple’s disagreement have created, but it does so without making Steef’s informed agreement to father a child part of the arrangement.

After a condom accident, Steef comes to Eva with a box from the night pharmacy containing emergency contraception. He apologizes for his earlier reaction and says he does not want to take any risk: he does not want another child. He describes Sem as having come against his will, while also saying that he tries to be a good father to him, and characterizes himself as too unstable and too attached to freedom to want another child. The encounter exposes sharply different meanings attached to the same intimacy: Steef speaks of a bond with Eva, but distinguishes that closeness from being in love and insists that he does not consent to another child.

The conflict becomes explicit when Peter returns and Steef tells Rebecca that she has stolen his sperm with Peter’s consent. He calls the act criminal and insists that he has a right not to want the child, invoking the responsibilities of fatherhood even as he says others have treated him as though they could decide his reproductive future for him. His accusation shifts the story’s infertility conflict beyond medical access: the question is no longer only how Peter and Eva might have a child, but whose consent and reproductive choices count in pursuing that outcome.

What infertility means in the novel

The repeated procedures and changing plans expose how unevenly the costs of conception are borne. Peter’s sperm results establish the medical obstacle, but Eva undergoes examinations, fertility treatment, pregnancy, and the loss of Lieve. Peter recognizes that imbalance and opposes further treatment partly because he cannot accept what it is doing to her; Eva, in turn, experiences stopping as the abandonment of a desire that has come to define her life. Neither position cancels the other, and their disagreement cannot be settled by treating parenthood as a simple matter of persistence or choice.

The later plan involving Steef revisits the same desire under different conditions. The hope for a child once joined Peter and Eva, even as treatment strained their intimacy; after Lieve’s death, it becomes entangled with grief, secrecy, and competing claims to parenthood. Across these reversals, the novel distinguishes the wish to have a child from the right to decide how conception happens. Infertility remains a medical condition, but its consequences are relational and ethical as well: it shapes whose body undergoes treatment, whose grief is recognized, and whether a hoped-for child can be pursued without overriding another person’s consent.