For Professor of Spanish Katy Ross, research is often personal, a tool to help process the things going on in her daily life. Ross’ most recent research is perhaps her most personal. Inspired by her own fertility journey, Ross recently published Narrating Infertility in Spain, an examination of the worldwide fertility crisis with a particular focus on Spain.

Before joining the faculty at Southwestern in the fall of 2005, Ross and her husband, Southwestern Associate Professor of Business Andy Ross, tried for many years to have a child of their own. After several unsuccessful attempts, Ross was diagnosed as infertile.

“It was actually the spark that I needed to look for a tenure-track job,” she recalled. “I spent a lot of time questioning, ‘what does it mean as a woman not to be a mother?’ There’s a lot about being a girl or a woman that is focused on mothering, and so the idea of not being a mother was complicated. That’s why I spent many years thinking about what motherhood means and what motherhood means for a woman who is not a mother.”

With these thoughts continuing to linger, Ross focused on her career. She began her teaching journey as an assistant professor of Spanish before earning rank as an associate professor in 2010. She was promoted to professor of Spanish during the 2015-2016 academic year, then received an endowed professorship in 2019, a role that she currently holds today.

As an expert in post-Franco Spanish literature, Ross frequently travels to Spain, spending time in bookstores and studying popular culture. In 1998, Spanish birth rates fell to their lowest recorded rate of 1.15 births per woman. In the nearly three decades since, Ross has seen first-hand a rise in fertility becoming a topic of discussion across literature, film, and public discourse. Connecting back to her personal infertility journey, Ross began digging deeper into the portrayal of motherhood and infertility among Spanish authors and directors.

After years of researching the topic, Ross was invited to give her first presentation about infertility in 2019. As the COVID-19 pandemic set in less than a year later, Ross began to seriously consider publishing a book based on her research. From there, the idea behind Narrating Infertility in Spain took off.

Published in December by Bucknell University Press and distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press, Narrating Infertility in Spain analyzes the worldwide fertility crisis. According to the United Nations Population Fund, although the global population has more than tripled since 1950, the average fertility rate per woman has declined from 5.00 in 1950 to 2.25 in 2024. By 2050, that rate is expected to fall to 2.10, the benchmark used by demographers to represent the average number of children a woman needs to have to maintain a stable population size. In her work, Ross examines what Spain has done differently to try to combat these global trends and the reasons behind those efforts being unsuccessful thus far.

“Spain has a 20-week maternity and paternity leave policy. They pay for fertility treatments for women under 40. They do all of these things, so why isn’t their fertility rate better?” Ross said. “These stories that I analyze are women narrating why: Why did they decide not to have children? Why did they postpone childbearing until their 40s? What happened in their lives, socially or economically, that made them make these choices?”

By analyzing five different books written by Spanish authors who detail their experiences with infertility, Narrating Infertility in Spain takes a deep dive into complex topics such as adoption, assisted reproduction, egg and sperm donation, and the decision for women not to have children due to economic or social instability.

When considering societal and economic factors surrounding infertility, Ross was again inspired by her own journey. After 10 years of thinking she would never become a mother, Ross was connected with a fertility clinic in Austin, where she ultimately gave birth to a baby girl.

“I thought about all of the ways that the fertility industry preyed on me. It was always ‘if you pay us $2,500 more, you could try this treatment, or if you have $8,000 more, you can try this other thing,’” she said. “I realized how much of that was really not even about having a child, it was about being successful. That experience made me reinterpret how I thought about fertility and the industry behind it that pressures women and sells women on this idea that to be complete, you have to be a mother.”

Through Narrating Infertility in Spain, Ross hopes that readers can take away two main points. First, she wants readers to understand that “woman” does not equal “mother.” While society has often blended these terms for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, the emergence of the global infertility crisis has created a greater need to see these two titles as independent of each other.

“It breaks my heart for all of the women who don’t have children, for any number of reasons, to have to face the question ‘how many kids do you have?’” she said. “It’s never ‘do you have kids?’ or ‘do you want kids?’, it’s always ‘how many?’. When someone asks that question, it breaks my heart.”

The second takeaway that Ross hopes to impress upon readers is a better understanding of the toll that is placed on women throughout the fertility cycle, from initially trying to achieve pregnancy through childcare required after birth and during adolescence.

“Women are still unequally responsible for childcare and taking days off when children are sick,” Ross said. “If you look at the statistics, women spend about twice as many hours managing childcare than men do, not just in Spain, but around the world. Why would women have more children if they don’t have equality? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Back on campus, Ross teaches both Spanish I and Spanish II, as well as upper-level courses about 20th and 21st century peninsular Spanish literature and film. Often, the themes that emerge in works studied in the classroom overlap with her research on womanhood and infertility.

“The best discussion days have been days that I have brought up my research because it relates somehow to the book that we’ve read or the movie that we’ve seen,” she said. “I always thought, ‘what are 20-year-olds going to think about infertility?’ but the students are really engaged with it.”

Ross is taking this conversation outside the classroom during a special Southwestern Scholars event on Sunday, April 12. Ross will be joined by Southwestern alumna and reproductive endocrinologist at Texas Fertility Center Erika (Sehne) Munch, M.D. ’04.

Munch will share how patients are navigating an expanding range of options for family formation, and what those choices reveal about how society thinks about family itself. Ross will share her cultural analyst’s lens to fertility trends across Europe, exploring what they reveal about women’s lives and desires, and the socio-economic forces shaping their choices.

The conversation, titled “The Future of Fertility: Biological Realities and Societal Shifts,” will take place at 4:00 p.m. in the atrium of the Fondren-Jones Science Center on campus. Registration is required via southwestern.edu.