Infertility is a serious problem in the world today. It is problem because of psychological and physical suffering that it causes, and it is also a problem because of economic consequences it has, both for these infertile couples who seek medical help and for society as a whole. Infertility is worldwide problem; however it should be possible to make great strides toward solving some aspects of this problem in the coming year (Sciarra 1994). “For most people, diagnosis and treatment is a traumatic process”. Once labelled infertile, an individual who has until then considered herself healthy is abruptly stigmatized with ‘Patient –status’ (Houghton 1987). Investigations and treatment of infertility may trigger iatrogenic illness (Spallone 1990). Life revolves around treatment plans and attention focuses on what one has failed to accomplish. This leads to loss of self-esteem, health, close relationships and even hope. Some people loss sexual potency or interest in sexual intercourse (Mahlsted, 1985; Woollet 1985) emphasizes that coming to terms with childlessness can be a long and difficult process. She also emphasizes the reasserting control in life, developing a positive identity and reasserting life goals and priorities. Grieving is an important part of the healing process. Emphasis is given to infertile couples as being in a crisis situation that places tremendous stress on patient either individually or as a couple. They reviewed the pattern of emotional response to infertility as surprise, grief, anger, isolation, denial and acceptance. They felt that counselling might be helpful in any of these areas but particularly in acceptance which may take long time to obtain (Rosenfeld and Michell 1979). During the initial counselling, it is important to explain to both the partners, in a simple language, the process of reproduction with help of chart and models and explain that it is possible to find faulty functions in both partners, and often overlapping causes exist, hence the need to evaluate and treat both the partners, concurrently (Padubidri and Daftry Shirish 2004). Many people will achieve this with relative ease. It is estimated one in six couples experience fertility problems and seek medical help. This represents a large number of people experiencing major life crisis, yet it remains the highly stigmatized and isolating condition affecting the relationship between the couple with their families and friends and it is likely to alter radically the view they have of themselves in society (Houghton 1987). Therefore an exploratory study to assess the coping pattren among infertile women in selected hospitals of Ludhiana Punjab was undertaken with the objectives: To assess the coping pattern in infertile women and to find out the relationship of coping pattern with selected variables such as age, education of women, education of husband, occupation of women, occupation of husband, type of family, place of residence, religion, family income, duration of marriage. A non-experimental, exploratory study was conducted in infertility clinics of selected hospitals Ludhiana, Punjab. The study sample consisted of total 100 infertile women. Data was analyzed by inferential statistics and presented through tables and figures.
