[7] Stigmas may be particularly acute in communities that organize themselves collectively and thus place a high value on clan, lineage and perpetuation of family legacy.
[3] In more-developed countries, the widespread availability of assisted reproductive technologies has "transformed infertility from an acute, private agony that was accepted as fate, into a chronic, public stigma from which there were costly, and often unfulfilled hopes, of deliverance.
Exclusion of the infertile or childlessness from social events is known, enacted as a means of quarantine to prevent the "contagion" or "toxin" of non-reproduction from spreading within the community.
"[5] In Catholicism, there is a limbo of infants for stillborn babies (as baptism is a sacrament available only to the living), thus women unable to bring a pregnancy to term would be told they would not encounter their children's souls in an afterlife.
[15] In the traditional Vietnamese belief system, childlessness risks destroying "the entire âm realm of one's ancestors and consequently scatters all ancestral linh hon into wandering ghosts and demons (ma qüy).
"[16] An individual's ability to deflect or resist stigma may depend on array of intersecting age, gender, class, economic, and/or psychological factors.