Success rates and success stories: Staging anticipation on fertility clinic websites in Taiwan, Japan, and the UK

This paper investigates how fertility clinics stage anticipation on their websites to create imagined futures for their potential users. We developed an analytical framework to explore their “tools of futuring,” focusing on two key modes: probabilistic and interpretative. This framework helps identify the strategies used by clinics to convey specific visions of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Data comprise content analysis of 59 websites in Taiwan, 90 in Japan, and 55 in the UK, focusing on in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2020–2021. Our findings reveal that success rates and success stories dominate the clinic websites, while mentions of risks and failure stories are nearly absent. This indicates that fertility clinics mobilize a particular dimension of anticipation—namely, “hope,”—and marginalize “fear.” In Taiwan, success stories are more prevalent than statistical calculations, highlighting an emphasis on emotional mobilization to attract clients. By comparison, a few clinics in Japan listed miscarriage rates on their websites, a rare practice aimed at presenting risks. Across all three countries, websites commonly highlight “pregnancy rate per embryo transfer” as the primary indicator, which tends to inflate the apparent effectiveness of the technology. However, clinics in the UK more frequently present live birth rates, the ideal metric for prospective users. The strength of regulatory power over fertility clinic websites at least partially explains the national differences in their anticipatory practices and calls for further research in this area.