The Law of Inverse Fertility in Literature
- In Addicted, Rose and Lily, neither of whom were trying for a baby or even wanted one, get pregnant within two weeks of each other. In "Long Way Down", Daisy desperately wants a child, and it takes months before she finally gets pregnant.
- In Babycakes by Armistead Maupin, Brian desperately wants to have a child with Mary Ann. Mary Ann has secretly stopped taking her birth control because she wants to surprise him with a pregnancy, but months go by with nothing happening. After (somehow) having Brian's sperm tested and finding that he's basically infertile, Mary Ann conspires to spend a night with a friend of theirs, a British naval officer who looks remarkably similar to Brian. However, even this fails because the friend has had a vasectomy. At the end of the book, Mary Ann's friend Connie dies in childbirth and entrusts the baby to Mary Ann and Brian's care.
- Averted in Lois McMaster Bujold's novel Barrayar. Cordelia, who's actually trying to have a baby with her husband, gets pregnant first go, while her friend Drou, in the midst of a pregnancy scare after an ill-judged encounter, is not. And then the real plot starts. Growing up, Miles is uncomfortably aware that his parents chose not to have more children, to protect their "mutie" son from being shunted aside.Now, family size; that was the real, secret, wicked fascination of Barrayar. There were no legal limits here, no certificates to be earned, no third-child variances to be scrimped for; no rules, in fact, at all. She'd seen a woman on the street with not three but four children in tow, and no one had even started. Cordelia had upped her own imagined brood from two to three, and felt deliciously sinful, till she'd met a woman with ten. Four, maybe? Six?
- Sonea in The Black Magician Trilogy falls under this trope from the virgin side of things. She manages to get pregnant while in the very stressful situation of travelling into exile into a hostile land filled with ruthless stronger magicians, who are hunting them (her and the teacher) as a prelude to the invasion the country they've just been exiled from. High stress isn't usually conducive to fertility.
- A major part of Gordie's character in "The Body" (the Stephen King novella that later became the film Stand by Me): his late brother Denny was born after a series of miscarriages and stillbirths and regarded as a gift from God, while he came along ten years later, when his parents didn't want another child.
- Mostly averted in A Brother's Price, as women who don't want to get pregnant usually will just take a female lover or be celibate. Men have Gender Rarity Value, and women who do have intercourse with men do so with the intent to get pregnant. However, it seems that Eldest Whistler got pregnant before getting engaged, or at least this could be suspected. Not played for drama, as she marries the man anyway. Played straight (justified) for most families who desire a boy child, though, as sperm quality is low, and male babies are frequently stillborn.
- Played with in Ciem: Vigilante Centipede in a few parts, but played totally straight most of the time.
- Candi seduces Donte twice in the hopes of them having a baby. And nothing happens either time. After Donte's (fake) death, Candi meets Denny. They try to restrain themselves at first but eventually succumb. They have sex numerous times without incident. Then, after tricking Gunner in a fight to kill himself by falling on his own knife, Candi has sex with Denny again. And this time, gets pregnant. By that point, she wanted a child, but was not amused with the timing. After Denny is Killed Off for Real, she rescues Donte and reconciles with him. Several times they try to get pregnant, with no success. It's when Candi no longer cares that she actually ends up conceiving Frank. Apparently, she's at her most fertile after witnessing a Self-Disposing Villain do his thing.
- Miriam never aimed to get pregnant at all. But in a subversion, it took a few hundred bouts of unprotected sex (she never once used protection with any of her seven partners in her lifetime) before she conceived Steve's child.
- Marina never really thought through the consequences either; just acted on a mad impulse. Still, it took her first time with guy #17 before she got pregnant.
- Clade: Ellie and Adam badly want a child and have to go through a two-year ordeal of fertility treatments in order to have Summer. Tom and Maddie have little interest in being parents and have Declan entirely by accident.
- In Codex Alera, Amara fears that she is infertile because she was 'blighted' (a potentially lethal disease that renders the majority of its female survivors infertile) in her youth. Bernard, her husband, points out that not every blighted woman is infertile, so they resolve to keep trying until they get the child they desperately want (repeatedly, and with much enthusiasm). After years of (very enjoyable) efforts, Amara finally resolves herself to never being a biological mother and instead focuses on caring for the orphaned children whose parents were killed in the recent fighting. Almost as soon as she accepts this, she is cured of her infertility and gets pregnant.
- Cutler Series: Dawn unintentionally conceives her first child Christie during her affair with her adult vocal coach in Secrets of the Morning. In Twilight's Child, her second pregnancy ends in a miscarriage (courtesy of Clara Sue), and she spends almost the rest of the book unable to conceive due to her mental state, despite both herself and Jimmy desperately wanting a child. It isn't until the end that she finally gets pregnant, and Midnight Whispers reveals that she successfully carries a son.
- Dark Heart: Kail and Shial have sex just once, and she gets pregnant despite her wishes to the contrary.
- In Katherine Kerr's Deverry Cycle, the Maelwaedd clan has something of a succession crisis looming. Rhys is the ruler and needs an heir. He's been married for years and his wife hasn't given him any children at all. His brother Rhodry isn't so burdened, has a way with the ladies, and accidentally gets a servant girl pregnant. Rhys, meanwhile, is forced by politics to cast off his wife for one who isn't barren and his cast-off wife is given to a widower with so many children, he needs a wife to mother them but doesn't need any more heirs. Within a year, Rhys's cast-off wife is pregnant and giving birth, causing everyone to realise that the infertile one is actually Rhys (nobles start whiling away their time by placing bets as to whether his second wife will ever get pregnant). Rhys tries to solve this problem by adopting Rhodry's illegitimate child as his legal heir, but he dies before he can go beyond considering it as a hypothetical solution.
- Delicate Condition:
- Anna needs to resort to expensive and painful treatments to conceive.
- Abigail (1789) is a woman of wealth who cannot get pregnant until her lady's maid takes her to a folk healer. Lucy (1648) is also unable to conceive until she receives advice from a midwife... who is later tried and found guilty of witchcraft.
- Judy (1957), who already has four children, finds herself pregnant again at 42, an age she considers obscene. Viviana, the daughter of strict Catholic parents, finds herself pregnant at sixteen.
- Happens to Detritus and Ruby as their relationship is developed through the Discworld series. Vimes notes that their marriage is happy but childless. They do, however, adopt Brick later in Thud.
- The Dora Wilk Series implies that this is true for all angels: as a species, they are so absurdly fertile that many of them end up having a child after their first sex, and nothing helps them in that regard. Defied, though, with the main character: as a fertility witch, she can reduce her chances of getting pregnant to zero.
- In Dragonriders of Pern, Lessa nearly dies after giving birth to her only son, F'lessan, and has no luck conceiving more children despite how badly she wants more kids. Kylara, on the other hand, has no trouble conceiving and bearing children, and hates it - so much so that after five babies, she starts using trips between as birth control. In a later volume, Mirrim has trouble not conceiving but carrying, and it's because she's been going between before she learns she's pregnant; the dolphins, however, are able to identify a pregnant woman and this enables her to protect her unborn child.
- Earth's Children:
- Jetamio and her mate Thonolan want a baby more than anything, but she struggles to conceive and has several miscarriages. She finally carries a baby to term but unfortunately there are complications, resulting in her death, whilst the baby is stillborn.
- While she's not too bothered about still being unmated, it's implied that Zolena wished she could've had children (and is possibly incapable of conceiving children); she mentions that despite having honored the Mother many times she never became pregnant, and Ayla also senses she seems wistful when she talks to other women about having children.
- In Gone, Diana becomes pregnant quickly once she and Caine get down to it, even though not long before that she was very badly starved, which should have had some kind of effect of her fertility/menstrual cycles (it should have stopped them).
- In Gone with the Wind, the one time Scarlett is genuinely happy to be pregnant, she miscarries.
- Khaled Hosseini is very fond of his trope; he mainly does it to challenge the traditional, "childbearing" role of a woman in society.
- In The Kite Runner, Amir's wife is infertile, and Amir believes that his inability to have a biological son is Allah's way of punishing him for refusing to report his best friend Hassan's rape.
- In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mariam is unable to have a child (she has seven miscarriages), leading to her abusive husband to favor his fertile second wife, Laila.
- In And the Mountains Echoed, Nila is infertile as well and essentially allows the kidnap of Pari so that she and her husband would remain respected in Afghan society. Pari, on the other hand, has an unintended child with her husband; Nila's jealousy toward her adoptive daughter's fertility leads her to commit suicide.
- Used in Impossible. As a part of a family curse, the Scarborough women end up pregnant at seventeen whether they want to or not. And it's not a magical pregnancy, either, since both Miranda and Lucy conceive when Padraig manipulates them into having sex when it looks like they won't of their own free will (and in Lucy's case, it's hinted that he tampered with the morning-after pill she was given). Meanwhile, it's mentioned that Soledad and Leo wanted a child of their own but were unable to conceive, which is one of the reasons Miranda decides to have them take care of her daughter when she fails her tasks and goes insane. It's subverted in Unthinkable when Fenella tells the circumstances behind her own pregnancy. She slept with her fiancé, hoping that getting pregnant would dissuade Padraig from romantically pursuing her. She succeeds, but it doesn't protect her the way she thought it would.
- In The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Ava and Midi are both fertile women, and they really wish they weren't. Both women get pregnant when they have no desire to, and Midi stays pregnant no matter how hard she tries to abort.
- Kris Longknife: Kris has a Surprise Pregnancy in Unrelenting despite having recently replaced her contraceptive implant. Or rather, because of: a disgruntled supply noncom had sabotaged a shipment of implants due to disagreeing with Kris having relaxed the regs on fraternization, leading to over seventy unplanned pregnancies and the petty officer getting a dishonorable discharge and sentenced to the manure works.
- Justified in the middle book of the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy. Shavri is The Mistress to the King and badly wants a child, but he's sterile which is the first sign of his impending fatal illness. In desperation, and with the King's approval, she turns to her friend Vanyel, who is gay but willing to sleep with close female friends for this purpose. She gets pregnant after sleeping with Vanyel once, because as a Healer she can ensure that egg meets sperm on the first try.
- Shelena and her partner in Loyal Enemies have sex exactly once, but when she's leaving immediately after, she seems confident that she's pregnant. Justified as Shelena is a werewolf and in heat on that day. The sequel novella reveals that they indeed have a child.
- In Colby Rodowsky's Lucy Peale, teenage Lucy becomes pregnant after one night of non-consensual sex with a boy who handed her a Coke mixed with beer.
- In The Mists of Avalon, Gwenhwyfar desperately wants to bear Arthur's child, but instead has miscarriage after miscarriage to the point where Arthur tells her to sleep with Lancelet in the hopes that he might be able to get her pregnant. Morgaine, on the other hand, gets pregnant with Gwydion (Mordred) the first time she ever has sex, which isn't ideal considering she was tricked into having sex with Arthur, her half-brother.
- Both averted and played straight in The Neapolitan Novels:
- Averted with Lila. Early in her marriage to Stefano, who she despises with all her heart and is repulsed by the idea of getting pregnant with, she doesn't conceive for a long time and eventually has a miscarriage. This is actually discussed in-universe as his family seem to attribute to her a supernatural ability to kill embryos in her uterus. She only gets pregnant again a couple of years later when she's very much in love with Nino, her lover and elated at the idea of having his child. The child turns out to be her husband's, however.
- Played straight with Elena, who doesn't want to have a child with her soon-to-be husband until after she has written a second book, and even goes with Lila to a gynecologist to obtain birth control pills for both of them. She falls pregnant immediately after the wedding.
- In Newes from the Dead, Anne is raped by the son of her employers six times, spaced over a larger period of time, and ends up pregnant. A later attempt at abortion fails.
- In the Outlander series, Brianna has sex exactly twice (once losing her virginity to her new husband and once by rape) and then finds out she's pregnant. This is maximum Rule of Drama because she then cannot be sure who fathered the child, and having a baby may trap her in the past.
- Record of Lodoss War: The Crown of the Covenant: Half-elves are canonically possible in the world of Forcelia (Lyle meets one in the story), but Parn and Deedlit were unable to have any children despite being together for half a century. As a consequence, she's come to view all of Lodoss as their children.
- The heroine of Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love is revealed to have been surgically sterilized as a teenager right after her unwitting husband announces he is looking forward to having children almost more than anything else. This trope then gets jerked around a lot, as Angel pulls an I Want My Beloved to Be Happy and leaves Michael, hoping he’ll marry someone who can defy this trope, and then eventually comes back and in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue is revealed to have had four children with Michael despite having been barren.
- Discussed in the latter half of The Sapphire Rose, the third part of the Elenium trilogy. The Child-Goddess Aphrael has to explain a few things to Sparhawk, namely that the poison which afflicted Queen Ehlana (Sparhawk's wife) for the first two books left her infertilenote , so as much as she and Sparhawk want children, it would be impossible. Aphrael, who loves them, therefore took it upon herself to spend nine months in Ehlana's womb and become their daughter, Princess Danae. This isn't exactly the weirdest thing to happen in Sparhawk's life up to this point, although it comes close, and once he wraps his head around it he takes it pretty well for the most part.
- In The Secret of Platform 13, Mrs. Trottle tries for a long time to have a child, and after finding out there's a waiting list for adoptions (don't these people know who she is!), she winds up stealing a baby (the prince of a magic island, though she doesn't know that) to pass off as her own. She finds out she's pregnant soon after the kidnapping and passes the baby off on her servant to raise, causing confusion when the prince's subjects come to rescue him.
- In Shadow of the Conqueror, this is the case for Emperor Dayless, who swore never to have any more children, and gave strict orders to his subordinates to make sure that none of the girls he paid, seduced, or raped ended up pregnant. His "contraceptive measures," however, failed spectacularly, resulting in dozens or hundreds of bastards.
- In The Ship Who... setting, adults serving the Central Worlds Federation are expected to bank their eggs or sperm. Humans are usually Long-Lived but women are still only fertile normally in their "first fifty" or so, sometimes accident or injury renders someone sterile, and if one's partner has banked their gametes then it's easier to have Someone to Remember Him By, possibly with the help of a Uterine Replicator, if they die.
- In The Ship Who Killed, Kira bitterly reflects that she and her husband Thorn had thought that banking business was an unnecessary hassle for a young couple in love and refused, but things went catastrophically wrong for unspecified reasons. Thorn was killed and Kira was rendered infertile, to her intense regret. In that same story, she and Helva team up for a "stork run", relieving a Sterility Plague by transporting donated embryos. Helva suggests combining sperm donated by Thorn's father and eggs donated by Kira's mother.
- The City Who Fought has the Kolnari invade a Space Station and have a lot of violent, morally dubious sex with the people living there. The station's primary doctor has to perform many abortions, as Kolnari sperm somehow resists the effects of station-typical birth control which causes the body to destroy most sperm, and a number of blasteocysts implanted in dangerous places like fallopian tubes.
- The Silerian Trilogy:
- Josarian and his wife very much wanted to have children. They had great difficulty though, and then she died while giving birth along with their child.
- Elelar, who thought she was barren, gets pregnant unexpectedly having sex just once with a man.
- A Soldier Of The Great War references this trope. A young boy is talking to the protagonist about various fertility superstitions he's heard. Alessandro tells him that the real rule is "Once if you're not married; a thousand times if you are."
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- Played straight with Lysa Arryn, who suffered six miscarriages and gave birth to two stillborn children before she finally had a living son, Robert, who is sickly, probably mentally disturbed, and not expected to live long (she pampers him anyway). One of the things that made her envious of her sister, Catelyn, is how the latter managed to give birth to five children, all healthy and sound, with no miscarriages or stillbirths involved.
- Aerys II and Rhaella Targaryen had success with their firstborn, Rhaegar, who grew up to be The Ace. However, their subsequent attempts to have a child weren't as lucky; Rhaella miscarried thrice, gave birth to two stillborn children, as well three children who died less than a year old. The continuous failure to secure his legacy probably contributed to Aerys' descent to madness, as his marriage to Rhaella went from amiable to toxic. Rhaella eventually gave birth to Viserys and Daenerys, but by then Aerys had become the Mad King and brought the downfall of House Targaryen.
- Daenerys has great hopes for her son with Drogo, as he is prophesied to become the Stallion Who Mounts the World. However, he is born dead thanks to a Blood Magic ritual gone wrong, and Daenerys herself becomes infertile, as she notes that she never experiences a period since the incident. Hence why she considers the three dragons her children, because "they are the only children [she] will ever have".
- Selyse Florent really wants to produce a male heir for Stannis Baratheon, but her attempts always end in failure. The one time she had a child, she gave birth to Shireen, a girl who was infected with greyscale. She complains that their marriage bed was soiled by Stannis' brother Robert, who had sex with Selyse's cousin, Delena, on it, and if they sacrifice Edric Storm, the bastard born by their union, to R'hllor, she'll be able to produce a son. By contrast, Stannis is far less concerned, and has no problem designating Shireen as his heir.
- Despite having no less than six wives, Maegor the Cruel repeatedly failed to secure an heir; every single one of his children were stillborn lizard monsters like the one born by Daenerys. It's eventually revealed that his third wife, Tyanna of the Tower, had poisoned his other wives while they were pregnant, but this did not explain the lizard thing, and many people genuinely believed that the gods had cursed Maegor to ensure that he would leave no legacy to continue his cruelties.
- Under non-fictional examples, one of the arguments made in Robin Baker's Sperm Wars is that human bodies are primed to be more fertile in situations where people are not in stable relationships (one-night-stands, affairs, rape, etc.) to improve genetic diversity, so people are more likely to get pregnant in the exact situations where they don't intend to.
- Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, particularly Victory of Eagles, also references this trope.
- Despite every other male dragon being able to easily sire eggs with female dragons, even those of other breeds, the titular character, Temeraire, notices that despite mating with many dragonesses, and the British government's high hopes he will sire offspring with the "divine wind", he seems infertile.
- In Throne of Jade, it is also noted that Celestials, like Temeraire, are so closely related that they do not mate with one another; instead, they mate with Imperial dragons to produce Celestial eggs. Occasionally, the mating of two Imperials also results in a Celestial. Because of this interbreeding, Celestials are very similar in appearance to Imperials and share many common traits. It is not known whether Celestial/Imperial matings may produce Imperials, or even if Celestial/other breed matings may produce hybrid breeds, or are even viable in terms of fertility.
- Captain Harcourt becomes pregnant from a casual affair with Captain Riley in Empire of Ivory, to both their dismay. They eventually decide to marry for purely pragmatic reasons, but the birth is extremely difficult, the child isn't suitable to inherit Harcourt's dragon, and Riley dies at sea later. Harcourt's few comments about the child are decidedly unenthusiastic.
- Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn wants a child more than anything, but all her pregnancies result in stillbirth. She finally fakes a pregnancy and adopts the child of an unwed Italian girl, and about a year later becomes pregnant for real and has a healthy baby boy.
- In The Twilight Saga, Rosalie and Esme can't ever have kids and yet they really, really want them. Bella, who isn't trying to have kids and in fact isn't even thinking about them, gets pregnant the very first time she and Edward have sex, despite being explicitly incapable of it. Justified if (as they imply) a female vampire can't get pregnant, but a male vampire can get someone else pregnant.
- Two Little Girls in Blue:
- Angie says she always wanted children but was told by doctors she couldn't have any biologically (and she'd likely never qualify as a foster / adoptive parent). She tries to substitute babysitting for motherhood instead. In Angie's case, it's made clear that wanting kids and actually be equipped to care for them are not mutually inclusive and that it's probably a blessing she was never able to have kids of her own, based on how she treats the twins she helps kidnap. Her desire for a child leads her to keep Kathy rather than return her with Kelly as planned, but motherhood quickly loses its novelty for her, to the point she goes off the idea altogether.
- Amy Lindcroft miscarried her first and only pregnancy, and had to have a hysterectomy to treat the resultant complications. Her sadness when talking about it with the FBI makes it clear she wishes she'd been able to have children, even though she's largely content with her life now.
- Violeta and her first husband Fabian struggle to conceive. For greater irony, he is a pioneer in their country in the use of artificial insemination for livestock. He even mentions in passing that Queen Joan of Portugal gave birth to her daughter through artificial insemination in 1462.
- In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Brothers of the Snake Antoni explains to a Space Marine that she has had two husbands and no children — presumably because of her Heroic Bystander actions earlier in the novel, when she went with him to where a Dark Eldar ship crashlanded and was exposed to heavy radiation.
- Being a kid's series, it's never explicitly discussed; however, a few characters in Warrior Cats are implied to have had kits after only mating once or twice. This is especially troublesome as a few of these are cross-Clan couplings.
- Whale Talk: Multiple characters were born to unmarried characters, sometimes through one night stands, while TJ's adoptive parents had four miscarriages while trying for a kid.
- Whats Bred In The Bone. Marie Therese, as a teenager, has sex with a hotel footman after her debut (possibly in ignorance of the potential consequences). Since the family is Catholic, of course, they wouldn't dream of an abortion, which was illegal at the time anyway... but lots of scalding hot baths, many doses of castor oil, and large quantities of gin are attempted. None of them work, and Marie Therese marries Francis Cornish Sr. to cover up the scandal.
- Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance: Sam Yeager and his new bride, Barbara, have sex without protection exactly once; on their wedding night. The once was all it took.
- Federico García Lorca's Yerma is mainly about this topic: a woman who wants a child but can't get pregnant no matter what.
- In Zel, a Twice-Told Tale of "Rapunzel", we get to learn about the witch's backstory and it turns out that she was a barren woman who desperately wanted a child of her own and turned her back on God to make a Deal with the Devil after she came to the conclusion that a truly good God wouldn't have inflicted an infertile woman with such an unbearable desire to have children. This is also what eventually drives her to lock up Zel in a tower when she fears that Zel's budding love for a boy might cause her to leave her one day.
