Paper Short Abstract:

The paper investigates the experience of breast cancer transit and the place that risk inaugurates as a frame of decisions regarding the use of oncological treatments and fertility care. It delves into this experience in the lives of women with the diagnosis as the place (non)desire of motherhood.

Paper Abstract:

This paper reflects on the experience of going through breast cancer by focusing on a particular moment that tends to affect women of reproductive age, in which a series of decisions regarding fertility care come into play. Here the place of risk assumes a preponderant place, given that the recommended oncological treatments can affect fertility. It is also often a turning point for women, which was not necessarily present or even a desire-driven concern, and which most often requires short-term decisions in the face of the emergency of diagnosis and the need to initiate treatments. Thus, faced with the disruptive nature of the communication of the diagnosis, a certain paradox arises in which, on the one hand, there is an incentive to start the indicated treatments as early as possible, while at the same time there is the added complexity of deciding on the care of fertility, in a context in which risk appears as a determining condition and a framework of uncertainty. We are interested in exploring how risk is understood and experienced, its impact on women's decision-making processes and daily lives, on the course of treatment and the experience of illness, on interaction with medical teams and also on family relationships. To this end, we use and analyse interviews with women who are going through breast cancer.