This project focuses on reproductive identities associated with infertility in the decades before infertility began to be commercialised through assisted reproductive technologies (ART). The invention of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in 1978 is often seen as a watershed facilitating the public visibility of a range of reproductive identities: from cross-border reproductive tourists and surrogate mothers, to same-sex parents and desperate single-childless women. However, little is known about how seemingly different reproductive identities of previous generations, such as adoptive parents, birth mothers, impotent husbands and childless wives, have shaped contemporary views both on infertility, reproduction and parenthood, and on the emergence of adoption and voluntary childlessness as global trends. This project aims to investigate reproductive identities associated with infertility and how they were constructed though intimate struggles, professional practices and public discourses of seeking and providing infertility treatments in the era when medical infertility treatments had just started to emerge and when the pronatalist norm on heterosexual parenting was the strongest. The project takes Britain, a leader in medical research on reproductive medicine and the birthplace of IVF, as a social laboratory to trace these continuities from c.1945 to 1980.