View article

Access to publicly funded fertility care in Aotearoa New Zealand is determined by clinical priority access criteria (CPAC). The CPAC for infertility is designed to ration public access to treatment based on those most likely to benefit. Included in the criteria is the requirement that the body mass index (BMI) of the person seeking fertility care be within the range of 18–32 kg/m² automatically excluding fat people without regard to their broader health and infertility context nor to variations in mean BMI amongst different ethnic groups. This chapter presents a critical discussion about the implications of the CPAC drawing on affective-discursive analysis of qualitative interviews with six ethnically diverse women who were unable to access fertility care because of their size. Key themes are explored including challenging the conflation of fatness with poor maternal health; fat shame and stigma and its effects; and the broader …