Culturally Responsive Reproductive Mental Health Practice: Pitfalls and Possibilities

Qualified fertility counselors provide psychological and decisional support to infertility patients, engage in implications counseling and psychoeducation for donor gamete recipients, and evaluate potential gamete donors and gestational carriers. Across each of these roles, provider cultural responsiveness or unexamined bias can impact the ethical delivery of services. This chapter considers the ways that both structural inequities and cultural context can influence the patients and third-party collaborators with whom fertility counselors interact. It also proposes guidelines for providing culturally and structurally competent care across the domains in which fertility counselors practice.