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Law of Inverse Fertility: Difference between revisions
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[[File:129041122701975931.png|frame|Red for movies, blue for real life]]
{{quote|''"Once on a time there was a king and a queen who had no children, and that gave the queen much grief; she scarce had one happy hour. She was always bewailing and bemoaning herself, and saying how dull and lonesome it was in the palace.
'If we had children there'd be life enough', she said."''|"[[Tatterhood]]"}}
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== Ballads ==
* In the [[Child Ballad]] ''[[Tam Lin]]'', Fair Janet becomes pregnant after her first meeting with Tam Lin. Which raises the spectre of an [[Arranged Marriage]] to ensure that the baby is born in wedlock, and has her resorting to some desperate measures to ensure the right father marries her.
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And he spak meek and mild;
"And ever alas, sweet Janet," he says,
"I think thou gaes wi child."'' }}
* Something similar happens in the [[Backstory]] of ''[http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch005.htm Gil Brenton]''.
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== Fairy Tales ==
* "[[Sleeping Beauty]]", both Grimms' and Perrault's:
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* "[[Rapunzel]]"
* In "[[Tatterhood]]", the queen is so eager to have a child, she neglects to follow the magical directions to get them.
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* Averted entirely in [[Lois McMaster Bujold]]'s novel ''[[Vorkosigan Saga|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.
** But Cordelia had been looking forward to having several children. Growing up, Miles is uncomfortably aware that his parents had chosen not to, to protect their "mutie" son from being shunted aside.
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* 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 and has a healthy baby boy.
* ''A Soldier of the Great War'' references this trope. A young boy is talking to the protagonist about various fertility superstitions he's heard about. Alessandro tells him that the real rule is "Once if you're not married; a thousand times if you are."
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* In ''[[That 70s Show]]'' this trope is invoked when Eric and Donna realize that Donna had missed a day of her birth control, and were therefore convinced that Donna was pregnant. Most teenagers don't realize that birth control doesn't stop working just because you missed one day, so their panic is understandable.
* On ''[[3rd Rock from the Sun]]'', Vicki and Harry go to a doctor when they can't seem to have a baby. [[Subverted Trope|Subverted]] in that they had only been trying for a month.
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* In an episode of ''[[Dharma and Greg]]'', Dharma became convinced that she and Greg were about to have a baby after seeing a vision. They tried to have a baby for a long time, using various methods, but, in the end, it was Dharma's middle-aged mother who became pregnant. Dharma explained that her vision was correct, but that she just misplaced its womb.
* In ''[[Sex and the City]]'', Charlotte, who is the character who's the most excited about the idea of marriage and family, turns out to have trouble conceiving. Miranda, who's more lukewarm on the subject, suffers an unplanned pregnancy. What's more, Miranda had a lazy ovary and the man who impregnated her had lost one testicle to cancer!
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